
111111 



MAN'S 
ORIGIN AND DESTINY 



SKETCHED FROM 



THE PLATFORM OF THE SCIENCES, 



IN A COURSE OF LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE THE 

LOWELL INSTITUTE, IN BOSTON, 

IN THE WINTER OF 1865-6. 



BY 

J. P. LESLEY, 



MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OP THE UNITED STATES, 
SECRETARY OP THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. 



PHILADELPHIA 



J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

1868. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by 

J. P. LESLEY, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern 

District of Pennsylvania. 




tmp 96 026223 



PREFACE. 



The lectures contained in this volume were written in the sum- 
mer of 1865, at a distance from the author's notes and library. This 
will account for the paucity of special references, observable through- 
out the greater part of the book. 

When delivered in the lecture-room of the Lowell Institute, the 
following winter, they were illustrated by numerous wall pictures, 
tables of statistics, maps and diagrams of various kinds, only a few of 
which are given as woodcuts in the text. 

It is proper to add that, owing to the very judicious restriction of 
time to one hour by the rules of the Institute, not much more than 
the half of each lecture was read, except in the case of the last two, 
which occupied four evenings ; the course being courteously extended 
by the honourable trustee to thirteen for that purpose. The twelfth 
lecture was, therefore, never written out, and is committed for the 
present to the imagination of the reader, with the suggestion, that it 
would better justify one portion of the title chosen for the book than 
anything actually to be found between its covers. 

Circumstances made it impossible to print the lectures at the time 
they were delivered. Two years, in fact, have passed. New and 
important discoveries in archaeology have intervened. A good many 
paragraphs have been inserted, therefore, in the text, and numerous 
foot-notes added. The simplicity of the original arrangement has 
been lost. The separate subjects of the different lectures have become, 
to a certain extent, confused ; and portions of the book take on the 
aspect of detailed discussion, suitable only to a scientific memoir, 
while other portions retain their original character of bird's-eye view. 

The author never contemplated anything beyond a general sketch 
of the present bearings of science upon the vexed question of the 
origin and earliest history of man. But the question has many sub- 
divisions. He intended the several lectures to be separate sketches 
of these subdivisions of the field of discussion, mere introductions to 
their proper study. His views are stated, therefore, in round terms. 
Nothing is closely reasoned out. Much is left to the logical instinct, 



IV PREFACE. 

and more to the literary education of the reader. Reference is every- 
where made to sources of information within easy reach of all. Even 
the style of an essay has been avoided. The book is merely a series 
of familiar conversations upon the current topics of interest in the 
scientific world. 

If its perusal start a single youthful mind upon the track of an 
original investigation — as the perusal of Harcourt on the Deluge, 
twenty years ago, opened before the author a new series of combina- 
tions of the facts of history and science — or if, without any deeper 
study of the facts alleged upon its pages, its general views inspire a 
single reader with more reverence for science, less fear of fresh 
opinions, a more intelligent curiosity about forgotten things, which 
still are at their old work in the modern world, and with a surer faith 
in the growth of human happiness, the author will be more than 
satisfied. 

But even the mere retrospect of the labours of men of science upon 
the theme of this book has been so great a pleasure to him that he 
cannot repress the feeling that others must enjoy it likewise. 

J. P. L. 

La Tour de Teitz, Yevay, Switzerland. 
Nov. 20, 1867. 



CONTENTS. 



LECT. PAGE 

I. ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES . . 1 

II. ON THE GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, AN- 
CIENT AND MODEEN ■ 20 

III. THE GEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY OF MAN . . . . 43 

IV. ON THE DIGNITY OF MANKIND 68 

V. ON THE UNITY OF MANKIND . . . . . . 94 

VI. ON THE EAELY SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN . . . . 122 

VII. ON LANGUAGE AS A TEST OF EACE . . . . 158 

VIII. THE OEIGIN OF AECHITECTUEE 183 

IX. THE GEOWTH OF THE ALPHABET 214 

X. THE FOUE TYPES OF RELIGIOUS WOESHIP . . 253 

XI. ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM 295 

APPENDIX 353 



MAN'S ORIGIN. 



LECTURE I. 

ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES. 

In considering how I can best open the subject of the 
present course of Lectures, I am reminded of a favourite 
saying of the greatest Lecturer that ever lived, and one 
whose lightest recorde'd thought has sunk, with the weight 
of a great principle of truth, into the consciousness of 
modern times : — 

' He that hath, ears to hear, let him hear ! ' 

One of the artists of New England told me that, in his 
opinion, no man could successfully paint a tree, a deer, or 
a dog, unless he first became one himself; unless he had 
pursued and been pursued ; felt the freedom of the winds 
and waters, and that intimate brotherhood and fellowship 
with living things, which sharpens every sense to the 
quick impressions of nature. Enthusiasm is the mother 
of art. 

Russell Smith, certainly the master scenist of America, 
built himself a cottage on the summit of the Alleghanies, 
in the heart of the primeval forest, and brought down 
from thence a friend, the finest elm tree in the world, 
painting it, as large as life, upon the great drop-scene of 
the Academy of Music in Philadelphia ; where it still 
stands, spreading out its gigantic stem and splendid plume 
against a background of blue sky ; and every branch and 
twig and leaf of it is real, for it was drawn in love. The 
artist summered it and wintered it as his bosom friend, 

1 



2 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lECT. 

until he knew how every vein of sap which fed it, ran ; 
until he could distinguish the voice of its particular foliage 
from the whole music of that wilderness, as a nice ear 
picks out and follows the part of some dear instrument in 
an orchestra, until he could recognize afar off every scar 
and moss-spot on it, as a lover can detect his heart's de- 
light among a thousand other beauties at a ball. Love is 
the law of knowledge ; and love is life in the beloved. 

Rosa Bonheur in the cattle-yard ; Hinckley among his 
dogs ; Church sailing through ice-bergs and drinking into 
his soul the naming northern skies ; Espy upon his house- 
roof at Harrisburg watching live-long nights the forma- 
tion and dissolution of clouds ; Agassiz and Desor in their 
cave-house on the medial moraine watching through eight 
successive summers the motions of the glacier of the Aar; 
Hammond for eighteen months weighing his meat and drink 
to discover and explain the exact effects of whisky and to- 
bacco upon the growth and decay of the living tissues of 
the human body ; or that noble Frenchman, who, instead of 
flying, like the rest, from the mysterious plague, or fight- 
ing with it hopelessly and desperately because its nature 
was unknown, rather chose to make love to it ; took it, 
as Delilah took Samson on her lap, to shear his locks of 
demon strength; shut himself in with it; watched the 
progress of the disease in his own body ; recorded all its 
symptoms; explained its methods of attack; discovered 
its weak point, and gave with his dying hand to the world 
a remedy : — such men as these teach us the noblest of all 
arts — the art of Enthusiasm. 

When the thinker becomes a speaker, he becomes an 
artist. His audience can justly criticise his subject only 
as they pardon his enthusiasm by sharing in it. He intro- 
duces to your acquaintance his oldest and dearest friends — 
thoughts, which to him are great thoughts, because they 
have commanded his best years. He paints in words 
before you the scenery of his soul's home ; a mingled 
landscape, where the reason has ploughed and reaped by 
day, and the fancy loitered and listened and made love by 
night. He gives you water from a spring, the equal of 
which, he fain would have you say, exists not anywhere. 
He names you over all his orchard trees, and looks wist- 
fully to see how their fruit hits your taste. He leads you 



I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 3 

by his well-worn paths of argument,, to points of view 
which have become the delight of his spirit; seats you 
where he has sat himself a thousand times entranced, and 
mutely begs you to worship with him before his wondrous 
Oberland. If he fails to inspire you with that delicious 
enthusiasm, he loses your friendship, and you lose his. If 
what to him are mountains of eternal truth, to you seem 
mist and fog, nothing is gained, and everything is lost; 
to you, the present effort ; to him, the entire past. The 
teacher must be believed in — for the present moment, at 
all events ; let the conclusion determine how justly. Cor- 
diality is of more avail for the discovery and appreciation 
of truth than curiosity. Only when all cried, Io Bacche ! 
together, the god appeared. And even the Divine Lecturer 
could only tell what the world already knew or was well 
prepared to know. 

We all, no doubt, have favourite sciences. "We all, no 
doubt, consider each one his own the flower and perfect 
consummation of the intellectual world. Does not the 
visible universe concentrate its glories in the individual 
eyeball ? It is only by numberless shiftings of position 
that the human mind can obtain a generous perspective of 
all truths. Each science has its own domain, and is para- 
mount lord within those limits. When it visits neighbour- 
ing potentates, it may be received with all the honours ; 
but, when seated, sits subordinate, and must hold its 
sceptre with diminished dignity. The king is the first at 
court, but the general is first in the field. And what are 
king and general but no-bodies in the laboratory of Liebig 
or Faraday ? And what are Liebig and Faraday but ex- 
press packages to the mind of Captain Anderson in an ice- 
fog off the banks ? Everything in its place, — everything to 
its purpose : that is the prime law. That differentiates the 
universe, gives it living activities, intense energies, precise 
results, variety of beauties, individual worth. But all for 
each and each for all, is God's grand spell upon his uni- 
verse, by which he marshals its forces against disorder, 
and establishes eternal harmony ; drawing slowly forth 
his silken rainbow- coloured ribbon from that mist of 
threads which hovers behind the loom. This is the charm 
of the science of the nineteenth century ; harmony in di- 
versity ; multiplicity in unity. Never was the dissection 



4 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT; 

of single objects carried so far as by our special natural- 
ists ; and yet the dreams of the ancients were not so 
grandly universal as the panorama unrolled for contempla- 
tion and elucidation by modern philosophers. 

Yet there is being established, with all this, a real order 
of precedency among our sciences. Some of them take 
naturally a wider range than others : geology, for instance. 
Some grow daily more and more departmental, functional, 
and ancillary. 

The history of empires is the history of science. Their 
boundaries shift. Smaller states are absorbed into king- 
doms. On the other hand, empires which have been in- 
discreetly enlarged by an agglomeration of hostile or un- 
sympathizing nationalities, fall asunder, and out of the 
debris are instituted separate and almost independent 
regimes. 

I will speak of Geology as illustrating both these tend- 
encies. At first it was like one of those wild tribes of Ger- 
many that conquered the Roman Empire. It was a rude, 
undisciplined study of a few of the most prominent features 
of the ground. But gathering strength as it developed 
the observing faculties, and emancipating itself from its 
aboriginal superstition of the Lusus Natures, adopting the 
purer faith in Cause and Effect, it conquered and subju- 
gated, one by one, all the other branches of human know- 
ledge. The dukes of this new Burgundy outshone and 
outweighed their liege lords — kings and emperors. Its 
later princes — Von Such, De Beaumont, Murchison, and 
Lyell, formed a splendid dynasty. The w ealth of the whole 
world of science flowed into its public treasury. They were 
even not afraid to wage war against the world of meta- 
physics, and it seemed as though Church as well as State 
would be absorbed into one great, upstart, irresponsible 
despotism. 

But how is it now ? Geology, as an empire, exists no 
longer. Instead, we see three kingdoms: three kingdoms 
so separated, that no one who rules in the one is accounted 
of the highest authority in the other two. 1st, We have 
the science of Structural Geology, which may be said to 
represent, somewhat, the old science before it was divided. 
2nd, We have the science of Palaeontology or Fossil Geo- 
logy, which first succeeded to the power of the old empire. 



I.] OP THE SCIENCES. 5 

and has 'for some time past been dominating, with a tonch 
of arrogance too, its structural neighbour. And 3rd, We 
have the science of Chemical Geology, a new and rising 
state, full of enterprise, and destined to absorb the con- 
federate states, known, in scientific parlance, by the name 
of Physics. 

And yet these three are one. Nor can a student of na- 
ture account himself well-bred unless he travels through 
them all ; although he will accomplish nothing great unless 
he naturalizes himself, and makes a home for himself, in 
only one of them. But what will not then that home of his 
become ! What a castle of intellectual strength ! What a 
cloister of various learnings ! What a museum of antiqui- 
ties ! What a rendezvous of the choicest spirits of the 
age ! 

Let me imagine myself for one moment a geologist, well 
established in such a place, occupied with the study of the 
formation of this earth, its sedimentary and metamorphic 
and volcanic rocks, the faults it has committed, the plica- 
tions and contortions it has endured, the mineral veins 
deposited in its fissures, the organic forms it has entombed, 
its reservoirs of brine and oil, its burning mountains, its 
earthquakes, its changes of sea level, its glaciers and mo- 
raines, its golden gravel, its meteoric stones, its ossuary 
caves and deposits of worked flints, its motions through 
space, its influxes from the sun, its beginnings in eternity. 
Can any theme be more capital, more universal ? Is any 
science excluded ? Is any question impertinent ? Must I 
not subpoena everything that lives, and that does not live, 
before this case is through ? Has not every savant of the 
Academy something to tell about it ? 

The architect and civil engineer begin by relating their 
experience of the choice of granites and clays, the weight 
and strength of building materials. The miner and the 
metallurgist recount me their latest improvements in rais- 
ing, selecting, and reducing the various ores. The chemist 
hangs upon my wall his nicest table of equivalents, and 
explains me why the magnesian limestones were \hQ first 
ones formed. The zoologist and the botanist lay upon the 
table, on each side of me, their latest enlarged and cor-, 
rected synopses of fossil and recent synonymes. The Arch-, 
deacon of Calcutta employs his heaviest mathematical sym-. 



6 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 

"bols in weighing for me the plateau of Central Asia, while 
Thompson and Hennesy are calculating the maximum and 
minimum possible thickness of the crust. With his new 
automatic tide gauges, and with the waves produced by 
the earthquake of Simoda, Bache gets for me the mean 
depth of the Pacific, while Darwin and Dana decide, from 
the arrangement of their coral reefs, the number and direc- 
tion of its belts of alternate elevation and depression ; Sa- 
bine and De Struve report the progress they are making in 
determining the earth's exact departure from a globular 
form. Astronomers swarm about me with their specula- 
tions upon cosmogony, and assign various reasons why the 
earth's nucleus is hot or cold, is fluid or solid, and why 
it must have sprung from the consolidation of a nebula, or 
why from the conglomeration of an infinite number of 
meteors. The Alpine Club petition for the pleasure of 
my company on their next ascent of Mont Blanc; and 
even Ruskin, the artist, insists on fixing me in a good 
light, so that I may catch the genuine bedplate lines on 
the precipices of the Arve, and never again make the ab- 
surd blunder of mistaking the cleavage of the shists for 
original stratification. 

Is it any wonder that the poor geologist's head is turned 
by so much attention ? That he accounts his own par- 
ticular science the summum bonum of truth? Yet in 
almost an equal degree may the physicist, the astronomer, 
the naturalist, the archaeologist, the metaphysician cheat 
himself with the sweet delusion, that he sits at the centre 
while others stand around. For let a soul, by purity, 
patience, and love, tame but one science, and it will have, 
like Una with her lion, the freedom of the whole forest. 

What, then, is the real order of the sciences ? Or is 
there such a thing ? Or is knowledge like a hollow sphere, 
within which the soul of man feels itself floating between 
equal attractions in all directions ? Is there any hierarchy 
of the sciences ? Is it as noble to know, as ennobling to 
determine, the number of rings constituting a genus 
among myriopoda, as it is to discover the number of 
vibrations corresponding to a given colour in the rainbow, 
or the number of formations deposited with their suc- 
cessive florae and faunae in all the ages from the Lawrentian 
era to the present time ? Or, setting this aesthetic ques- 



I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 7 

tion on one side, can the human reason find no just ar- 
rangement of the sciences, by which our ideas of progress 
and development may be realized, and their natural sub- 
ordination and interdependence so shown forth as to satisfy 
our love of perspective ? 

Others may answer this question in other ways. The 
remaining time, which your politeness will allow to this 
lecture, cannot perhaps be better consumed than in stat- 
ing, as clearly as I may, the order which appears most 
natural to me, when I attempt to classify the various de- 
partments of human knowledge. And I find myself in a 
manner compelled to make this preliminary statement, 
since I have chosen for the subject of the present course 
of lectures, f the relation of the modern sciences to the 
primeval history of man/ 

Do not imagine, from this title, that I intend to develop 
in formal style, after the manner of the German meta- 
physicians, a history of philosophy. I willingly leave that 
immense task to the vivacious eloquence of Erdmann, 
prince of Hegelians, and to the golden pen of Whewell, 
vice-chancellor of induction. I have a much more special 
design : to show how the bonfires we have lighted and are 
feeding with fresh fuel every day, cast back their illumina- 
tion through the forest and over the moors of history; 
bringing out from the thick night and distance, bizarre 
but moving forms, progenitors of our progenitors a hun- 
dred times removed ; lighting up their savage features, 
not wholly bestial nor insane, not wholly destitute perhaps 
of some angelic or Adamic excellence; so that we may 
specify some of those earlier forms of soul, to which was 
given this planet for a habitation, and be able to make out 
the original nature of many things which gibber and 
mowe at us, through the dim past, as if they were super- 
natural attachments to our history, evil genii, imperti- 
nences and intrusions on the premises of our race, and 
not amenable to any exorcism except that performed with 
fasting and prayer. It is my firm belief that the time 
comes for explaining the beginnings of human life upon 
the earth ; that if all the sciences can be brought to act 
in concert, they can do much towards already setting up 
primeval archeology upon its future throne. I shall en- 
deavour to show — I am sorry I can only do it sketch-wise 



8 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lECT. 

— liow we can combine the results of the geologists, the 
ethnologists, and the linguists, with the creations of the 
priest, the poet, and the architect, to restore and re-colour 
the faded, broken fresco-painting of the ages on the walls 
of the temple of history. But to accumulate evidence, we 
must examine the value of each witness. And the first step 
is to call the roll and swear them in by name and residence. 

The earliest attempts to classify knowledge distinguished 
between the natural and supernatural ; between the phy- 
sical and metaphysical ; between that which relates to 
phenomena appreciable by the bodily senses, and that 
which relates to the essence and power of things, the 
moods of intellect, and the status and intentions of Deity. 
Of the first-named distinction of the subject-matter of 
human knowledge into the natural and supernatural I 
may have occasion to speak at large in a future lecture, 
because it has been much misunderstood. The second 
distinction, viz. into physical and metaphysical, although 
it maintains its importance, in a measure, to the present 
day, is felt by every thinker to be so general and so 
vague, so indistinct in the light of modern investigations, 
that it remains in use only as a popular convenience for 
common conversation. 

The word physics, from the Greek verb fud, I grow, 
means the science of nature seen under the conditions of 
growth.. But we need to introduce among the sciences of 
nature's growths the sciences of nature's for ces, with many 
of which we have become experimentally acquainted. These 
forces are no longer considered as outside of nature, or 
above nature (metaphysical), they are no longer gods and 
demons, but laws. In fact, modern science has trans- 
ferred the name physics entirely to the discussion of this 
class of sciences, including the knowledge and use of num- 
bers and quantities. The word ' physics ' now means the 
teaching of the growth-causing agencies; light, heat, elec- 
tricity, galvanism, magnetism, gravity, &c. And the ut- 
most to which the meaning of the word is ever extended 
only takes in the application of the experimental know- 
ledge of these forces to the sub-sciences of astronomy, me- 
teorology, and geodesy. All true (fyvcrts is now no longer 
discussed as ' physics/ but as ' natural history;' the 
growth of plants ; the growth of animals and man. And 



I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 9 

yet this growth is effected by a force which has .not been 
enumerated among the physical forces, and is not even 
alluded to in the science of physics proper, viz. the form 
force, the forma formans of the schoolmen; that idea of 
itself, which every growing being has, how it shall form 
itself in growing. This has nothing (so far as we know) 
to do with what we call mind, reason, instinct, or any of 
those fruits of brain- structure or nervous organization, 
which are the special objects of study of the intellectual 
sciences ; but underlies and antedates them ; inasmuch 
as the form-force even determines in each family, genus, 
and species of beings, whether there shall be a brain or 
not, and what rank its intelligence, reason, or instinct 
shall take. 

This living form-force is the true basis of the sciences 
of natural history, 'distinguishing them from the science of 
the imponderables, or the so-called physical forces of 
space. 

But there is also what may be called the dead form- 
force, which acts (equally beyond our comprehension) 
through the inorganic or non-growing world, producing all 
kinds of crystals, minerals, and rocks ; determining their 
shapes also, with as despotic a decree as that which fatal- 
izes the shape of a tulip tree, or of the panther that 
stretches himself in ambush along its branches. In fact 
all the crystalline world is as much a ' growing ' part of 
nature as are the vegetable and animal kingdoms.* But 
we suppose them to grow under the operation of the 
purely physical forces only; and therefore we place their 
sciences of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, between 
pure physics and pure natural history. 

In the historical development of all the sciences, lies are 
the beginnings of truth. That Helen, whose beauty set 
the world at arms, began existence in a shape so hideous 
as to be concealed for nine long months from every eye. 
Criticism then, even the criticism of love, would have 
been fatal to her. So has it been with each embryo 
science. Hidden in the ignorance of Plato and of Aristotle, 
in the so-called history of Herodotus and geography of 
Strabo, were the germs of some of our grandest sciences ; 

* See the beautiful sap-growth of Arragomte in the caves of Derby- 
shire. — Q. J. Geol, Society, Lond. xxi. 



10 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 

ethnology, philology, sociology, theology; the natures of 
which being nobler than those of the physical and natural 
sciences, inasmuch as they deal entirely with man, man's 
soul and God, God's providence and institutions for the 
future, require longer to mature, and are therefore still 
not So far advanced as they might be ; but in those early 
days they were like the Hebrew poet's chaos, bohu-va-vohu, 
without form and void. 

Those tales of the Makrobioi, or long-lived happy patri- 
archs ; of the Lotophagoi, nature's own epicures ; of Pig- 
mies and Troglodytes ; of men with tails, and men with but 
one foot, and that one large enough to be of use at noon 
for an umbrella ; of Arimaspians and cannibal Massagetes ; 
of satyrs and ogres ; of Niobe and Lot's wife, and whole 
nations turned for their pride into marble statues ; of 
Deucalion and Pyrrha, Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, 
Cadmus and his dragon's teeth, Pelasgus, Dorus, and 
^Eneas, and the numerous lying genealogies of nations, 
accepted then as all-sufficient explanations of the course 
of events preceding the times of their authors, and re- 
jected by us as figments of the imagination, — were these 
not the faint first flutterings of the unborn and yet un- 
fashioned foetus, which has grown in course of ages to be 
that thing of strength and beauty which we name ethnology, 
the science of nations ? that queen regnant of the human 
sciences, daughter of chronology, and mother of history, 
whose two fair sisters sit at eacli hand of her— mythology 
and archaeology — an imperial group ! 

It is impossible not to feel that we are taking human 
studies in their natural order. First, thoughts; then, things. 
In the beginning was the Word ; then the Word was made 
flesh, and dwelt among us. We must go backward, not 
forward, to obtain the absolute ; for out of the abstract con- 
ception comes forth the concrete reality. Before the uni- 
verse was, God was ; and with him dwelt the eternal and 
immutable relations of number. Mathematics and Physics 
give us tho prime postulates of all creation. This is the 
group of sciences which must necessarily lead the pro- 
cession. 

Then follow the incarnations of numbers and forces in 
matter, giving us chemical and geological laws for the 



I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 11 

creation of the lowest and oldest, the inorganic world. 
Thus we have our second group. 

Then come the organic sciences as a third group, carry- 
ing up the scheme of life to man. 

Fourthly, we have the historic sciences ; discussing what 
man's life has been, from his appearance on the planet 
until now. 

Then rise grave questionings — what man's life ought to 
be. From these questionings, begun by Pythagoras and 
Plato long ago, and continued by philosophers of all ages, 
a steadily thickening crowd (become at last so great that 
we may affirm with truth, in this year of 1865, that all the 
thinking men and women of Europe and America are in it), 
there has been elaborated a new science, Sociology, the 
doctrine of Bight Society; or, rather, a fifth group of allied 
sciences under the various names of Statistics, Finance, 
Construction, National Defence, and Equity. Each of these 
has its facts and its theories, its principles and its history 
of practice. Mankind was made gregarious ; society has 
always existed ; manufactures, commerce, war, and law 
have always been, and must always continue to be, its four 
methods of self-expression. No others can be named. On 
their well-collated statistics must be established all our just 
explanations of history, all our successful schemes of phi- 
lanthropy, all politics that may escape reproach. Statistics 
are the mathematics of Sociology ; and the Treadwells and 
Stephensons, the Barings and Girards, the Napoleons and 
Grants, the Blackstones and Marshalls of modern times, are 
as much men of science, if not of as high a grade, as Pascal 
and Descartes, Leibnitz and Newton, Pierce and Henry, 
Berzelius and Dumas, Owen and Agassiz, in the sW?.alled 
world of science. To freight a Great Eastern with living- 
souls for a land of liberty is a grander achievement of the 
centuries than to transmit the price of American gold by 
submarine telegraph to the Brokers' Board in London, to 
be used in behalf of vested wrongs for back-holding the 
progress of humanity. Nor is it to be doubted for a mo- 
ment by a Boston audience, at the close of the Great Re- 
bellion, that the Atlantis of Plato was a crude boy's dream 
compared with that splendid vision of a justified and sanc- 
tified Republic, founded on the experience of the Saxon 



12 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 

race in a new world, equipped by all the arts and sciences^ 
instructed by Christianity, and invested with liberty, pro- 
phesied for the last thirty years by your own immortal 
William Lloyd Garrison, and now almost fulfilled. In this 
large workshop of the Free States of America, the whole 
rolling stock of civilization is being reinvented, tested, and 
started off afresh upon the track of history. In the schools, 
and courts, and legislatures of these commonwealths, the 
social sciences are rapidly attaining that nice precision and 
that generous scope which already characterize the mathe- 
matical, the organic, and historical sciences, with all of 
which they are so closely allied. 

And now, if I have not already wearied your patience, I 
must instance still another — the last and noblest class of 
all the group of the intellectual sciences. Those which I 
have already described relate to the measurement of space 
and time, to the attributes of matter, to the growth of 
plants and animals, to mankind as part of the animal world, 
and, finally, to mankind in masses, obedient to physical ne- 
cessity and planetic circumstances. But these relate to 
Man. These teach the expressions of a supernatural na- 
ture; of a spirit which we believe to be immortal, self- 
conscious, self- studious, inventive and creative, open-eyed, 
and tongued for speech, responsive to all mysteries, and 
destined for all glories. 

The base and platform of this pre-eminent group of 
sciences is Language. Philology is the mathematics of 
the soul, teaching us the rudiments of utterance. The 
sciences of feeling are named Belles Lettres and the Fine 
Arts ; Logic is the science of thought ; Ethics the science 
of conscience. All these are old. Modern Christianity 
has added two more to the list, the sciences of Education 
and of Philanthropy. And, to make the whole complete, 
we must end the long catalogue with the science of wor- 
ship, that is, Religion. 

In order to refresh our memories, and keep perfectly 
distinct these different groups, with their elements, I have 
hung upon the wall the chart which you see before you. 
It was a scheme constructed to classify the books of a 
large and miscellaneous library. And for practical use its 
different sub-divisions or classes were distinguished by the 
primary colours of the rainbow, in their natural order from 






I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 13 

red to violet. The backs of the books were marked with 
these colours, and the cards on which the titles of the 
books were separately catalogued were also of correspond- 
ing hues. But you have probably already noticed that 
instead of six classes, the scheme upon the wall has eight ; 
the first one, white, for science as such, or human know- 
ledge in the general ; the eighth one, violet, containing but 
one name, and one which I have omitted to mention in my 
foregoing remarks. It is not a science, properly speaking, 
yet. But you will all perhaps agree with me that it ought 
to be. "We may, however, well despair of it when we remem- 
ber that the greatest of fools, Boswell, wrote the most de- 
lightful of biographies. Yet it is so far forth a science that 
it stands apart from the rest ; dealing not with mankind 
as animals, nor with mankind as a race, nor with mankind 
in society ; nor with man's life in the studio, in the lecture- 
room, or in the church ; but with men, as men ; each mortal 
by himself, sitting for his picture before the lens of Truth. 
In its intensest form, as Autobiography, it is the science of 
one's self; the summation of knowledge, for God is un- 
knowable, except as reflected in his image, man ; and 
man's individual life collates into a personal history the 
entire circle of celestial and terrestrial phenomena, mimick- 
ing like a falling raindrop the surrounding universe. 

In all ages, since the invention of letters, attempts have 
been made to immortalize the heroes and prophets of the 
world by writing out their lives ; and most of the know- 
ledge of the ancient world which remains to us, has de- 
scended in the form of biography. The pictures which 
forgotten scribes have painted of Moses, and Joshua, and 
David, and Isaiah, and the Maccabees, are among the 
most precious legacies of antiquity. What is more exciting 
• than the life of Pythagoras by lamblicus ? or more delight- 
ful than Plutarch/ s Lives of noble Greeks and Romans who 
had lived before his day ? Yet after all that scholars can 
say of them, the biographies of the ancients were failures, 
in comparison with the best of modern times, because of 
the meagreness of ancient life, the difficulties of inter- 
course, and above all, the narrow range of ideas, owing to 
the limited education of the writers. 

In this, pre-eminently, the difference shows itself 
between ancient and modern davs. We skim the ocean and 



14 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 

devour the land, collecting facts by steam and transmitting 
them by telegraph. They consumed half their lives in a 
few snail-pace journeys and baffling voyages, confined 
within the compass of a thousand miles, a prey to terrify- 
ing accidents, victims of unblushing falsehood and un- 
bounded ignorance. 

The crowd of modern travellers and writers is so great 
that every lapse from honest observation, every mistake of 
eye or ear, every inept construction, every misquotation, 
every false assumption, every distortion of word or deed 
through pride or prejudice, every failure of appreciation by 
stupidity, every undue exaggeration by affection, every 
mistake of superstition, is sure to be corrected, almost as 
soon as made. 

But in those ancient days the lonely priest went plod- 
ding on, year after year, reaching occasionally some 
monastic home where he could find a week's or a month's 
repose, as a rare and welcome guest from foreign lands. 
And there he heard, without the power or wish to criticise, 
extraordinary tales, incredible to modern minds. None had 
been there before him by whose judgment he could guide 
his own belief. He wrote all down. And. for a century, 
perhaps for twenty centuries, no traveller would follow him 
to verify or falsify his stories. You see how little chance 
Sesostris, Cyrus, Zoroaster, or Lycurgus had to get their 
biographies recorded properly. But even if the truth about 
them could have been attained to, and even could we 
summon them in person before our Niebuhrs, Macaulays, 
Michelets, and Prescotts, to be cross-examined, on their 
oath and honour, would not each of them be apt to answer 
in the words of the knife-grinder : 'Lord ! Pve no tale to 
tell, sir ! ' For the manifold relations which men of mark 
and genius in the nineteenth century hold to all depart- 
ments of art and knowledge, constitute the chief difficulty 
in the way of writing their biographies. And at the same 
time this difficulty, well wrestled with, by men of equal 
mark and genius, has carried up the tone of life-writing to 
the pitch at which we have it. 

Had there been an Edward Forbes in Plutarch's day, 
we should have had a Wilson or a Geikie in Plutarch to 
describe him. For Nature is the best Quarter-master, and 
never hesitates to fill an order when it is properly red- 



I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 15 

taped. But there could be no Edward Forbes in ancient 
days, for the same reason that there were no elephants 
nor monkeys in the Jurassic age, nor pterodactyles in the 
Devonian era, nor lepidodendra in Silurian times. All 
things wait their turn. The genius of development is a 
fine scene- shifter. The Demiurge works leisurely, and 
hates to be hurried. Time is of no account, but circum- 
stance is indispensable. A perfect Biography requires a 
type Man. Men are just now beginning to write the Life 
of Jesus, because the life of Jesus holds closer relationship 
with the millennium than with the middle or the heroic 
ages, and demands for its comprehension the knowledge 
of universals, rather than particulars. The general work- 
ing of his spirit upon and within the constitution of the 
world, had to be, not tested, but testified by the experi- 
ments of twice a thousand years before its all-embracing 
applicability, its never-failing certainty, its infinite many- 
sidedness could be assented to by science. Crichton must 
visit all the courts and universities, and conquer in every 
contest of etiquette or eloquence, before he can be called 
the Admirable. And each of the centuries is itself a separate 
court and university, at which the growing humanity takes 
some new degree. 

The true science of biography is professed by the great 
novelists of the day. We see its growth in reading the 
works of Goethe, and Scott, and Thackeray, and Victor Hugo, 
and their thousand pupils in the divinest of all arts, the 
picturing of human life. These are the teachers of the 
nineteenth century. These are the books into which have 
fallen all the treasures of learning and wisdom of all the 
ages. Christianity, honour, politeness, wit, and humour 
are taught now chiefly through novels. They are the 
mirrors in which the many-sided power of the modern 
world contemplates itself. Each man, each woman goes 
to the novel now to get such glimpses of their inner life, 
and their outward relations to nature and mankind, as 
thrill them with emotions of pride and love, plunge them 
in remorse, lift them again with hope, confirm their fresh- 
born resolutions, and warn them against insidious dangers. 
The good that Charles Dickens has done the world is in- 
calculably great. I should rather be Charles Bead, and 
have written ' The Cloister and the Hearth/ than have 



16 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [lECT. 

been Gibbon, and have written 'The Kise and Fall of the 
Roman Empire.' One American city now is larger than 
the whole Roman Empire was in the days of its splendour. 
We must measure matter spiritually, to get its just dimen- 
sions. Compare Horace with Tennyson, or Cicero with 
Sumner, or Augustus Caesar with Abraham Lincoln, if you 
wish to see how the world has grown in the richness of its 
relationships, and how the development of man as an 
individual has kept pace with it. Barren enough would 
be, even could it be written, the biography of an aboriginal 
savage. 

How far backward we shall hereafter be able to trace 
this law of human development ifc would be rash for me> 
or for any other man, to say with dogmatism. 'Nor do I 
desire to take up the vexed question here this evening. 
The sciences which it has been the object of this lecture to 
classify, are not themselves sufficiently developed to settle 
it. Mankind still wear too disagreeable a resemblance to 
their apes, the quadrumana, to argue it. From that eleva- 
tion which the Christian strives to reach, where the last 
trace of hog and tiger and baboon will leave his nature, 
and he shall rest, transfigured, at his Master's feet, and 
feel himself a worthy friend of angels — perhaps he may 
hereafter look down, without those uncomfortable emo- 
tions, which even the fairest discussion of the origin of 
man gives rise to now. Enough, that so far as written 
history is concerned, and some dim glimpses into pre-his- 
toric times can be obtained, the law of human progress, of 
social, mental, and moral development, is a great cer- 
tainty; on which all our learned histories and philosophies 
are based ; and without its clear and consistent recogni- 
tion, all reference to the early ages of mankind will be 
mere losing ourselves in Sorbonian bogs and Hercynian 
forests, filled with 

1 Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, 
Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.' 

It is my intention in this course of lectures to attempt 
to show how far the sciences, as they are now advanced, 
succeed in throwing light upon the early history of our 
race. I do not know that I need make any apology for 
the choice of this subject in preference to one more strictly 



I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 17 

professional : although it is by no means, in the language 
of the world, a useful one. But I feel sensibly the tend- 
ency of our times to utilitarianism and materialism. I 
think it is wise sometimes to shut up shop and walk in the 
twilight, and look up at the stars, or down upon the sea. 
The end and object of all science is, not to print calicoes, 
but to brighten up the face of man. And if the thought 
of ages long ago can breed within the human heart one 
sentiment of pious contentment with its lot, or one hope 
of future happiness, or any increase of that faith which 
believes that all things are well ordered and sure, and work 
together for the good of those that love God, — that 
thought of ages long gone by is useful. 

But the mere attempt to reconstruct the past is favour- 
able to our knowledge of the present. In no way can we 
better judge of tools than by building with them. I pur- 
pose in this course of lectures to test the temper of our 
sciences, to see if they will break on one of the hardest of 
all subjects of discussion. In doing this we will pass in 
review, as it were, their capabilities. This of itself will 
well repay our time. 

The chief charm of all such subjects as the one I have 
chosen, lies in a sort of super-naturalism which floats 
about them like a haze ; tinting them purple and gold as 
the air at sunset tints the distant mountain- tops. In our 
daily life we feel the hardness and roughness of matter, 
until our souls are sore and faint. But when we turn to 
the far distant past, we feel this hard and rough material 
world melting and mixing with strange fancies, pliant 
laws, conjectural processions of events, cloudy possibili- 
ties, and over all, the bending form and earnest face of 
the All-Father at His work. So sang the old Hebrew 
bard : — ( I am Sophia ; I am the abstract wisdom ; I was 
with Him in the beginning, when He laid the foundations 
of the earth, and the morning stars shouted for joy/ 

The ancient histories, like the primary rocks of the 
North, are all rounded and polished and streaked and 
beautified by the slow movements of the Recent over them. 
We may find columbines here and there blooming in their 
rifts. 

It does us good to cultivate the grand superstitions 
which are indigenous to that mountain-land. What is 

2 



18 ON THE CLASSIFICATION [LECT. 

superstition, but the posture of the human soul when it 
stands erect and treads brute matter under foot. We talk 
of our under- standings : Yes — but what of our over- stand- 
ings ? We men of science of the nineteenth century are 
becoming too exclusively men of understanding. ' I 
will speak/ said Paul, ' I will speak with the understanding 
and the spirit also.' 

All I would say in this introductory lecture is this ; that 
I do not believe in a beginning without God, any more 
than in an end without Christ ; and therefore you may ex- 
pect to hear me treat all the parts and details of the in- 
vestigation into the early life of mankind on the earth, not 
only by the rules of the Naturalist, but also in the spirit 
of the Spiritualist ; and with a profound faith in Christi- 
anity as the blooming of the century-plant. 

The modern sciences conspire to prove that man is an 
animal, and that his history is bound up with the zoolo- 
gical developments of the remotest geological times. But 
this does not injure the discussion of his spiritual faculties 
and his immortal future. 

The sciences agree in impressing us with man's subjec- 
tion to the physical laws which are so despotic over all 
other departments of nature. But this need not blind our 
eyes to the function of the Will ; to the laws of right and 
wrong ; the reality of responsibility, and the alliance of 
the soul with superior natures, unseen as well as seen. 

The sciences enjoy together a code of criticism, which 
they make obligatory upon the scholar of the past ; a code 
too little known, too long neglected by the scholars of the 
past. By this criticism we will find all written history 
false or defective ; and all human language so overcharged 
with the effete decomposition of ancient ideas and prac- 
tices, as to make philology rather a barrier against, than 
an avenue towards, the knowledge of antiquity. But on 
the other hand, is that to overthrow our faith in the 
sublime traditions which we have from those old times ? 
The light of antiquity streams into our Church of the 
Present through wonderful stained windows — and is all 
the more ravishingly beautiful, and quite as useful for all 
that. While we learn that no ancient Scripture is to be 
believed, — we learn also that all ancient Scripture is to 
be believed. When we turn towards the future we see as 



I.] OF THE SCIENCES. 19 

through, a glass darkly, but still we see ; and all the better by 
the nearer we bring our eyes to the glass that stops our 
vision. So when we turn towards that other eternity, the 
past, we see as through a glass darkly, but still we see ; 
and all the better for the criticism which has been reduced 
to such perfection by the labours of men of science in our 
day. 

I repeat then, that for the truthful and useful discussion 
of the relations of the modern sciences to the early history 
of man, it is necessary for your lecturer to believe as pro- 
foundly in the essential and indestructible principles of the 
Christian religion as in the axioms of Euclid or the law of 
chemical equivalents. Nor has the slow progress of the 
sciences of geology and comparative anatomy done more 
to retard our knowledge of primeval antiquity, than has 
the unchristian state of the theological and social sciences. 

In my next lecture I will illustrate the difference be- 
tween the ancient forms of knowledge and our modern 
sciences ; and show how impossible it is, without the help 
of a cultivated fancy, to investigate the natural history of 
an age of human existence, over which an uncultivated 
fancy bore entire sway. 

In the third, the fourth, and the fifth lectures of the 
course, I will treat of the antiquity, the dignity, and the 
unity of the human race. I will devote the sixth lecture 
to the social life of the ancients. The seventh lecture will 
be on the origin of language. The eighth on the origin 
of taste and the development especially of architecture. 
In the ninth I will give you my theory of the origin of 
letters ; the invention of the alphabet ; and the nature of 
those spiritual fancies which became concrete in the 
mythological traditions of the world. My tenth lecture 
will treat of the religious instinct, and its embodiment in 
ceremonial worships. The eleventh will be devoted to what 
I consider the most ancient symbolism of the priesthood. 

If I make my views clear to an audience so exacting of 
precision and completeness as this is sure to be, it will be 
more than I dare to hope. But at all events I can give 
you some faint sketch of the expanse of the knowable 
which lies before the so til that reverently and lovingly un- 
dertakes to question Heaven and Nature about the begin- 
ning of its kind. 



20 



LECTURE II. 



ON THE GENIUS OE THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, ANCIENT AND 
MODEKN. 

In the last lecture I gave yon a classification of the 
modern sciences in eight groups, the first group represent- 
ing science in the general; and the second group com- 
prising the mathematical, exact or physical sciences proper. 

My lecture this evening should show you the relations 
of this second group to the early history of man. In other 
words, should answer the question, how much information 
the mathematicians, the astronomers, the meteorologists, 
the geodesists, or physical geographers, and the students 
of light, heat, electricity, motion, &c, can. give us respect- 
ing the planting of human society upon the earth. 

Not much. No! not much. But yet a little. 

Before I recount this little, I have something more, in- 
troductory, to say respecting the right which modern 
science has to speak at all upon this subject ; a right, as 
you are probably well aware, denied ; denied by the pul- 
pit; I mean, of course, from the uneducated and more 
ignoble side of the pulpit. For science has already won 
stalwart champions from among the clergy ; and we less 
seldom now are forced to listen to those storms of mingled 
arrogance, absurdity, and bad taste, which formerly made 
of the pulpit a very cave of Eolus ; those discordant de- 
nunciations of dangerous novelties, through the loud up- 
roar of which were ever to be more easily distinguished 
than any other words, the warning words of Paul to 
Timothy : ' Keep that which is committed to thy trust, 
avoiding profane and vain babblings and oppositions of 
science falsely so called, which some professing, have erred 
concerning the faith/ 

A thorough-bred and noble-minded theologian will scorn 



ON THE GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. 21 

to turn against himself this beautiful apostrophe of the 
philosophic and great-minded apostle,, this wide and ten- 
der appeal to the fresh heart of Christianity to keep itself 
from the intellectual idols of that day, the demoralizing 
sophisms of Athens, and the beastly Gnosticism of An- 
tioch and Alexandria ; — against his own inner life ; against 
the education of the 19th century ; against these ennobling 
and refining sciences which have been born of Christianity 
in her best estate, and glorify her on earth, as the spotless 
robes of her elect will glorify her in the heavens. 

Let us comprehend, then, before we go one step further 
in this course, the difference between the so-called science 
of the ancients, of which Paul spoke, and the sciences of 
modern times, which he knew nothing about. 

They differ in two respects, the most essential possible : 
1, In their genius, or animus ; 2, In their method, or ap- 
paratus. 

1. The genius, or animus, of the ancient science was 
essentially fanciful ; childish ; cared little for consistency ; 
was inexperienced; preferred to believe; was impatient 
of criticism ; had no purpose in its investigations ; no use 
for their results. 

The spirit of modern science is just the contrary; — 
practical and manly ; at once critical and comprehensive ; 
more disposed to deny than to affirm; insists upon all 
things being put upon their trial ; rejects even truth her- 
self if she stammers before the court ; cross-examines 
without pity ; insists upon absolute consistency ; is regard- 
less of consequences ; takes nothing for granted; worships 
cause and effect ; investigates always in the light of some 
hypothesis, and applies every discovery instantly to use. 

2. In the second point, of Method, the difference is 
equally patent to observation. The method employed of 
old was as fanciful as the spirit. The only intellectual 
tool above the level of their senses, which the ancients had 
to work with, was their quick and fertile imagination. 
With this they reasoned. Their powers of observation 
were fine, but they neither knew what to look for nor how 
to correct false observations, nor how to combine what 
they knew, so as to frame laws by which to carry on the 
work. What little they got, the most of it was worthless ; 
and what was valuable they soon lost. There was no con- 



22 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 

cert among their sages. They washed the gravel, but 
could not crush the quartz. They merely worked the 
out-crops of knowledge, because they had neither engines 
for deep mining, nor railways to take away the ore, nor 
furnaces wherein to bring the metal to nature, nor labora- 
tories for assaying its purity. They wrote books, but 
there were no reviewers. In a word, true science was as 
impossible a product of the human mind so long as the 
fancy fished and hunted through its primeval wilderness, 
as commerce and luxury and art are impossible until the 
invention of the axe, the plough, the anvil, and the loom, 
cause the physical forest to disappear with its wild deni- 
zens, and farmers, artisans, and townsmen to take their 
place. 

The whole story is told in one sentence, when we say 
that modern science replaces Fancy by Experiment. Its 
whole profession is inquisitorial. It tortures the dumb 
truth. To say what you can prove is the only passport to 
its favour. None of your suppositions, is the only response 
it deigns to give the sciolist. It is harder on contractors 
than any army -inspect or at Springfield. It cares for no 
expense in renewing and improving its machinery, and 
keeps selling off its condemned material to — the clergy. 
'Be sure you are right; then go ahead/ is its favourite 
saying. It may wink at the fancies or inaccuracies of a 
favourite over-night, but woe be to him in the morning ! 
With its whole soul modern science hates idols — those 
that Lord Bacon classified, and all others, — and despises 
hero worship. It encourages predictions as stimulants, 
but murders the prophet whose vision comes not to pass ; 
yet it has great patience when the prophecy is both very 
new and very grand. 

You will notice then that the great distinction between 
ancient and modern science is this : that the former was 
the product of undisciplined fancy, and the latter is the 
product of careful, repeated, and systematic experiment ; 
simply the difference between conjecture and knowledge. 
For fancy and experiment are the two poles on which the 
world of human knowledge turns. Or, to change the 
simile, fancy is the steam which lifts the piston-rod of 
intellectual progress ; experiment, the guides in which it 
moves. 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 23 

Now let me apply these ideas to tlie first member of tlie 
group of mathematical sciences with, which we are dealing 
to-night; the science of numbers. It affords us a fine 
illustration of the difference between ancient and modern 
science. I do not speak just now of the aboriginal ideas 
of numbers which the earliest tribes of men obtained in 
their savage state. I shall speak of that directly. And I 
use the term ' ancients ' in its common sense, meaning the 
classical ancients, of whose life and doings we have some 
traditional history. 

The ancients invented arithmetic and geometry, but the 
moderns have possessed themselves of that all-powerful 
apparatus of investigation, the differential calculus. The 
ancients had a fanciful or superstitious reverence for num- 
bers, believing them to embody an occult and fearful magic, 
according to which the universe was originally created, and 
under the influence of which all life was thought to move. 
The moderns love numbers, because by them they can work 
out in a reasonable and precise manner both the darkest 
and the noblest problems of creation — the distance of the 
stars, the weight of the planets, the velocity of light, the 
composition of matter, the progress of population, the rate 
of insurance on life and property.* The mathematics of the 
ancients could produce nothing higher than astrology ; 
that of the moderns has produced astronomy, meteorology, 
geodesy. Its last and crowning triumph has been the 
establishment of the law of the ' convertibility of forces/ 
by which we now know that not the smallest portion of the 
universe is ever lost ; that motion, when it stops, becomes 
so much light and heat ; that light and heat, when they 
distribute themselves, supply to nature an equal quantity 
of electricity or galvanism ; that galvanism becomes mag- 
netism ; and that magnetism gives place again to motion. 
Did St Paul mean to say that all this is ' science falsely so 
called ' ? Is this the yvaxns that he denounced so vehe- 
mently, as opposing itself to all that Jesus Christ had given 
him to hold in trust until he should come again to judge 
the world in righteousness ? I trow not. 

Let me call up before your imagination that great vision 

* The truthfulness, the reverence of exact statement and description, 
which distinguishes the occidental from the oriental man, may be deduced, 
perhaps, rather from this influence than from any other source. 



24 GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 

which stood to the ancient philosophic world for the sum 
of all speculation upon the way God made the worlds. It 
was their yixao-Ls ; the doctrine of the Gnostic or Oriental 
world. I leave you to judge yourselves how much science 
there was in it ; and how wisely, seeing its intense, proud, 
irreconcilable opposition to the Gospel of Christ, Paul 
warned his followers not to be seduced from their holy 
faith by it. In one form or other the whole mathematico- 
physical science of the ancient world consisted in this cos- 
mogony. It stated its fanciful principles thus : — 

1 . That matter and spirit are the two hostile elements of 
the universe. 

2. That there can be no intimate intercourse between 
the Absolute, pure spirit, God, and the Material, gross, 
vile, sin-producing, chaotic, rebellious, and insane stuff out 
of which bodies are made. 

3. That therefore the universe must have resulted from 
the existence and operations of energies or intelligences 
holding an intermediate place between the Absolute and 
the Material, filling up or bridging over the awful chasm 
between God and Matter. 

Upon these assumptions, and this comprehensive syllo- 
gism, a thousand fanciful philosophers erected their cos- 
mogonies ; like the cathedrals of the middle ages, all dif- 
ferent, but all belonging to one style ; some smaller and 
plainer, others imposing for their immensity, bewilderingly 
complicated, and covered over with elaborate ornamenta- 
tion . The central idea of all of them was that of emana- 
tion. Eons came forth from the Divine essence as deftly 
and numerously various as ribbons from a juggler's mouth. 
Down slid the long Jacob's ladder, with an angel or arch- 
angel standing upon every rung, until its foot touched 
and rested firm upon the mass of crudity to be informed. 
High at its summit stood, waving her wings, the Celestial 
Sophia, and at its foot the Demiourgos or Creator of the 
earth, the Jewish Jehovah, with face downcast, and brawny 
arms, the Terrestrial Sophia always by his side. And this 
was the most advanced philosophical statement of the 
origin of men and things that the science of the ancients 
ever succeeded in making ; and modern science can detect 
in it neither rhyme nor reason, because it was neither based 
on observation, nor calculation, nor experiment. 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 25 

Let me set before you now another and far different 
picture. That was ' science falsely so called ; * this is 
true science. It may not be scientific truth, for its de- 
monstration has not yet been completed. But it is true 
science for all that ; because it is the product of a Fancy 
disciplined, mathematical, experimental, and observant. 
I allude of course to the Nebular Hypothesis. 

The Nebular Hypothesis is to us modern naturalists 
what the gnostic cosmogonies were to the cabbalists of 
yore, and is illustrated in a perfect manner by the genius of 
modern science. It has swelled rapidly to its present pro- 
portions by insensible degrees ; by yearly accessions of 
facts, discovered and recorded in the different departments 
of inquiry. Its constitution is purely mathematical. 
Grant its one postulate, — That space was originally full of 
homogeneous matter obedient to the laws of physics — and 
its whole argument follows logically to the close ; and it 
accounts for everything we see and know about the visible 
world. And this first postulate is strictly reasonable; 
even if it turn out in the end not to have been true ; for 
1, It agrees with all experimental observation as thus far 
made ; and 2, It is based upon a set of observations of its 
own. I mean the observations of telescopic nebulae. 
Nor can it be finally disproved and laid aside until more 
powerful telescopes shall have been made to resolve into 
separate stars the last remaining nebulae. And even then 
the a 'priori possibility stands good. Saturn's rings will 
continue to discuss the question with any comet that may 
happen to drop in. 

Emanation was the genius of the old cosmogony ; 
Evolution is the genius of the nebular hypothesis. It 
paints the universe as either at first created an infinite 
mist of unequally distributed elemental atoms ; or else as, 
at stated intervals, becoming such. It sees great move- 
ments beginning, or re-beginning, in this unformed but 
living infinite ; centres of growing aggregation ; and tend- 
encies towards those centres. It calculates the conse- 
quences of these tendencies, and proves that great gyra- 
tions must result from them. It shows how the laws of 
heat will bring about consolidation ; and how the laws of 
motion will effect at first a ring and then a planetary 
system, in each vortex, throughout infinite space. Thus 



26 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 

stars and suns, nebulae and comets, earths and their satel- 
lites, appear upon the scene; each with its proper 
motions ; each destined to work out a different history, 
according to its circumstances. Then it takes up our 
solar system, and calculates, and weighs, and keeps per- 
petual watch upon it. It suspects the existence of an 
extra member of the system, and by pure dint of numbers 
finds it. It proves the molecular discreteness of Saturn's 
rings, and the aqueous character of the envelopes of 
Jupiter and Mars. It invents the thermo-electric pile, and 
proves that the sun's spots are not so hot as the rest of 
its face, and that the body of the moon is as utterly cold 
as space itself. It invents the spectroscope, and makes 
out with it five of our metals in the sun, and two of them 
in Sirius. Then it takes up our earth, and shows how 
once it more than filled the entire orbit of the moon, first 
throwing off a ring which became our moon, and finally 
condensing to its present form, a globe of lava, with a 
crust of rock, a skin of water, and an envelope of air. 
It sketches out the story of this crust: how its first flakes 
emerged and joined, and were re- enforced and thickened 
from below, compressed, turned up, re-melted and re-form- 
ed : how a steady torrent of hot acid waters rained down 
constantly upon all portions of this forming crust, disin- 
tegrating it as fast as it was consolidated, and flying np 
again in steam, to carry off its heat into surrounding 
space : how in due course of time the seas became cool 
enough to retain both their waters and the alkaline and 
acid sediments which they brought into it : how the 
chlorates and carbonates of the land changed partners 
when they reached the sea, and formed the salt which 
gives it sweetness, and the dolomite which made its an- 
cient bed : and how, as time went on, changing the pro- 
portions and relations of terrestrial elements, form after 
form of life appeared, each suitable to the exact amount of 
heat or cold, of light or darkness, moisture or drought, 
acidity or alkalinity, of its place of birth, and changing then 
to something else, or something better, when it could no 
longer live a life conformable to its own nature ; each form 
superior to the one preceding it ; until at last man came, 
to find a world grown firm enough to live on, cooled to the 
temperate point, soiled, shaded, lighted, watered properly, 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 27 

sprinkled with gold and precious stones, inlaid with iron 
and brass, and floating through what is to him a finished 
universe. 

Have we not here a procession of realities, where before 
we had a mist of dreams filled with the fantastic gibbering 
of ghosts ? That is just the distinction between the ancient 
Gnosis, and, in a less degree, all ancient knowledge, and 
the modern sciences. 

Let me now turn your attention to the same strong con- 
trast between ancient and modern thought which the prac- 
tical application of these cosmological views exhibit. I 
mean the application of the old Gnostic theories to the 
practice of astrology, and the applications of modern astro- 
nomical science to the discovery of the laws of climate, to 
the practice of navigation, and to the measurement of land, 
forming what we call the sciences of Physical Geography, 
Navigation, Geodesy, and Civil Engineering. 

The essential element of the contrast still is, that the one 
is a system of fancy, the other a system of facts ; the one 
exercised habitually a cruel power over the lives of men by 
its claims to magic; the other blesses mankind, not only 
with the purest lessons of universal law and order, but with 
comfort in the house, and safety on the sea. 

Take a well-known example from the history of the 
founding of the Christian Church. In the Acts of the 
Apostles we read that, at Ephesus, an uproar threatened 
the best part of its citizens with fire and sword for doubt- 
ing that the stone, which the worst part worshipped, fell 
from Jupiter. It would be hard to raise a riot now-a-days, 
in Washington, by any story our astronomers could tell 
about the great ring-meteorite which forms the central ob- 
ject of attraction in the Museum of the Smithsonian Insti- 
tution. Modern science calculates that five millions of 
these bodies strike the outer stratum of our atmosphere 
every day ; and that the major part of them, driven by 
their own or the earth's velocity to various depths in it, 
are triturated, smelted, evaporated, distributed by the 
winds, and slowly settle to increase the size of the earth. 
An occasional larger mass, becoming incandescent only on 
its outside, throws off a cloud of volatilized matter as it 
passes through the atmosphere, and then resumes its dark, 
cold flight through space — space that is full of such. Now 



28 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 

and then one hits the earth in its orbit so fairly that it 
succeeds in reaching the bottom of the atmosphere, and 
buries itself in the soil, or in the broad expanse of the 
ocean. In the old days of astrology men would have built 
a temple over it, and organized a priesthood for its worship, 
and regulated politics by its magnetic auguries ; but in our 
days of astronomy, the finder cuts it up into pieces and 
sells them for five dollars a-piece, to be labelled and stowed 
away in cabinets with bottled tarantulas, Indian arrow- 
heads, and coprolites from the chalk. 

One perhaps is powwowed over at a meeting of the 
Meteorological Society, where an interesting paper is read 
by Mr A. on the observed height, length, direction, ve- 
locity, and luminousness of the meteor's flight, as seen 
from half-a-dozen small villages in different parts of the 
country; and another piece may form the subject, per- 
haps, at a meeting of the Chemical Society, of an equally 
instructive paper by Mr B., showing the probable consti- 
tution of the meteor, from a careful analysis of the frag- 
ment ; disclosing the presence of so much iron, so much 
nickel, so much schreibersite, with remarkable traces of 
carbon; suggesting the possible existence of unknown 
organisms, whether animal or vegetable, the author cannot 
say, upon the planetic body of which this meteor seems to 
have formed a part. A third perhaps goes over to Vienna, 
where, at a meeting of the Imperial Academy, the vener- 
able Herr Hoffrath Hai dinger draws attention to certain 
impressions, as it were, of human fingers, in the at-one- 
time plastic mass, but only at one end, and shows that the 
end so marked must have been the backside of the meteor 
as it flew, behind which, as in a ship's wake just abaft the 
rudder-post, an eddy of incandescent air and gases had 
been formed, reducing the metal to plasticity and leaving 
upon it these impressions ; at the same time he shows how 
the solid banking up of the air in front of this frightful 
projectile must have brought its forward career to a sud- 
den stop, when the earth's gravity would take effect and 
bring it, almost at a right angle, to the ground. 

Such are the two different ways in which ancient and 
modern science would treat the objects of science, show- 
ing always the same preponderance of a helpless and 
therefore fearful fancy on the one side, and of a bold and 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODEHN. 29 

powerful criticism on the other. The human race was 
placed upon the earth at the same disadvantage through 
ignorance, which prevents a traveller from sleeping the 
first night he spends in a strange inn. The human heart 
grows timid in the dark, while familiarity with the obscure 
breeds contempt. The human race regard old heathen 
terrors now with the same nonchalance with which a 
family, born under its roof, hear noises in a haunted 
house ; or rather with that staunch, earnest, watchful in- 
telligence with which an engine-driver walks round and 
round his well-regulated and thoroughly comprehended, 
yet tremendous, machine. 

You will not of course mistake my meaning so far as 
to imagine that I contrast the ancient and the modern 
worlds ! I am only contrasting the ancient gnosis with 
modern science. Superstitions of the lowest kind still 
fill the earth. I speak of the genius of the learned world. 
The same uncultivated fancy keeps alive in our day, among 
the uneducated classes and races of men, astrological and 
all other ancient absurdities. They float daily to us across 
the Atlantic, like cloud-rack, to be absorbed and made to 
vanish in the clear, dry intellectual air, which, thank God, 
we w T ere born to breathe. The education of the w T orld as 
a whole has hardly yet commenced. It might well strike 
us with astonishment to see a we W- educated world fight- 
ing for slavery instead of for liberty, reeling with drunk- 
enness, reeking with squalid vice, roaring with obscene 
profanity, as so much of ours does ! No, we are simply 
considering the contrast between the intellectual condition 
and habits of the philosophic world as it existed a few 
thousand years ago, with what its intellectual habits are 
now ; and what is the actual Christian value of the science 
of nearly the entire population of these Northern States, of 
Scotland, Switzerland, and Prussia, of the upper classes 
in England, France, and Italy, and in fact of the wealthy 
everywhere. 

About six months ago a letter, addressed to me in Bos- 
ton, reached me, I know not by what means, through the 
Office in Philadelphia. It had been written by some 
motherly body down in Maine, and enclosed an old one- 
dollar bill. It gave the hour and minute of the woman's 
birth, and begged me to return the horoscope in diagram, 



30 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 

with the prediction founded on its figure. And in a 
touching little postscript, as badly spelled and written as 
the letter itself, she added the birth-date of her favourite 
son, and begged me to include his fortune in her own. 

Now it is a very curious question : on what principle the 
notion of the government of human fortune by the stars 
could have been so early, widely, and permanently estab- 
lished. The idea of cause and effect, or of antecedence 
and consequence, not to go into its metaphysical dis- 
cussion, seems inherent in intelligence. Even the lower 
animals exhibit it. The reason why our ponies are alarmed 
at wheelbarrows and dummy engines, is evidently because 
they cannot comprehend how anything can go unless it be 
preceded by a horse. They seem to be infected with the 
same horror of the prodigious, which we would tremble 
under were we to observe St Denis marching off from 
martyrdom with his head under his arm. Our savage an- 
cestors never became intellectually reconciled to an eclipse 
of the sun or of the moon because they could suggest no 
benevolent cause for it ; it seemed to them like some 
deadly swooning of a father or a mother, threatening 
themselves with orphanage. The worship of the heavenly 
bodies must have borne exact proportion to the daily and 
nightly benefits they bestowed upon mankind. At the 
equator the sun was an enemy, at the poles a friend. The 
Arab addressed his praises to ' the great rock in a weary 
land/ because it protected him from the solar rays. The 
Scandinavian, on the contrary, watched the declining sun 
from June to December with undisguised anxiety, erected 
slanting dolmens to detect the first certainty of its ap- 
proaching return ; and when assured that its face was once 
more set towards their habitations, over which their enemy 
the snow had already begun to heap itself, they dragged 
the yule log to the hearth, and danced and sung and drank 
the grand carouse of all the year, making the frozen air 
resound with their Christmas carols under the mistletoe, 
long before Christ was born, or a mass had ever been said 
in honour of the Sun of Eighteousness. The celebrated 
contest between sun-worship and pyramid- or water-wor- 
ship which characterized a part of the monumental history 
of Egypt was a conflict of sentiment between the equatorial 
and the polar zones, the iconoclastic sun- worshippers 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODEEN. 31 

coming into the valley of the Nile from the mountains of 
Armenia and the distant steppes of Scythia, at the close of 
the 14th* dynasty, 2000 years more or less B.C., as they did 
again under Cambyses about the year 500 B.C., and again, 
to take permanent possession, as the Turks of the 13th f 
century of the Christian era, long after the old sun-worship 
had been exchanged for the rational religion of Mahommed. 

In like manner the worship of the moon must have 
sprung from that dependence on her lovely light which was 
inevitable in an age of forests, when men had neither 
lamps nor clocks to live by, and were surrounded by such 
wild beasts as bows and arrows could do little to offend, 
lions and tigers, hysenas, auroxen, and the great horned 
Irish elk, wolves and wild boars, and the immense cave 
bear, the elephant, and the rhinoceros. 

Without the waxing and waning moon man would have 
taken no account of time ; no weeks, no months, nothing 
but the long cycle of the year. The idea of sequence was 
bound up with the moon ; she became the goddess of or- 
der, made story-telling possible, and lovers' assignations, 
and parliaments. On the worship of the moon the whole 
Druidic system of law, as well as ceremonial, leaned ; and 
when its canons were abrogated and its usages were sup- 
pressed by Christianity, they still continued to exist as 
popular superstitions. The majority of farmers, to this 
very day, regulate their planting and felling of timber, 
their pruning and grafting, by the phases of the moon ; 
while their wives in the kitchen would find all their yarn 
untwist, and all their soap go back, unless they consulted 
the almanac. 

In one or two instances modern experimental science has 
actually reinforced the ancient superstitious observance of 
the moon. It is now well understood that young plants, 
like human babies, must have plenty of rest. If they shoot 

* Mariette (Apercu, &c, 1867) accounts for the lack of monuments of 
the 15th and 16th dynasties by the invasion of the Hyksos. Bunsen 
agrees that they came in with the 4th king of the 13th dynasty, but they 
did not become legitimate sovereigns until the 1 7th dynasty. See Renan, 
quoted below at the beginning of the 6th lecture.) The actual solar disc 
fanatic who did the mischief was Axen-aten, who followed Thutmosis I. 
of the 17th dynasty, his mother being a foreigner. — Indigenous Races, 
Gliddon, 1857, p. il6. 

f The Turkish dynasty of Ottoman sultans commenced in 1258. 



32 GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [lECT. 

up from the seed in the waning of the moon they enjoy 
the repose of long, dark nights ; if in the growing moon, 
their young life, over-stimulated, perishes, or suffers dete- 
rioration, more or less. The latest observations make it cer- 
tain that the sun-heat reflected from the full-moon's face is 
sufficient to dispel clouds, and it must modify, therefore, 
notably, the climate of the kitchen-garden. One of the 
most brilliant astronomical discoveries of the last ten years 
is that of the so-called Eleven- Year Cycle, during which 
Jupiter and the other planets alternately collect upon one 
side of the sun, and then at other times disperse themselves 
around it; producing, in the one case, an abundant supply 
of spots upon the sun's disc, with a corresponding lowering 
of the climate of the earth; and, in the other case, the dis- 
persion and disappearance of spots, and a higher mean 
temperature for the earth. 

These are merely instances showing how the instinct of 
man may sometimes anticipate the final deductions of his 
reasoning faculties ; and we are thus taught to despise 
nothing, not even the follies of superstition. 

Still less ought we to despise the ancient worships of the 
sun and moon, inasmuch as our own notorious irreligion is 
due to an insensibility to the benefits which we receive all 
the time, and on all sides, from Nature, caused by our mo- 
dern mastership of Nature. The slave-holder feels no gra- 
titude to his slave ; the magician cannot worship the devils 
who do his bidding ; therefore I have always thought that 
the poet only showed his ignorance of human nature and of 
the tendencies of natural science, when he wrote — f The 
undevout astronomer is mad ! ' Ignorance has always been 
the mother of devotion. The man who can hold the solar 
system in his fist, and measure and weigh it with his scale 
and compasses, and predict with accurate certainty what 
its changed aspect will be a hundred thousand years be- 
yond the term of his own appointed career upon the earth 
— this man may worship his wife, his emperor, his coun- 
try's flag, his science, justice and honour, and the Great 
God of the invisible universe ; but certainly not any hea- 
venly object, nor even God on account of the mere wonders 
of His sky. 

But in old times it was not so. The procession of planets 
went on to and fro with the mystery and grandeur of a 



II.] ANCIENT AND HODEEN. 33 

procession of priests ; and was so worshipped. The myste- 
rious pole-star was the savage man's best friend, and the 
sailor's also. The dog-star, rising as the snn went down, 
just when the blessed inundation of the Nile promised a 
harvest for the coming year, came in, of course, for a large 
share of Egyptian love and reverence. Shepherds of 
Persia and Arabia had nothing else to do, whole nights, 
whole years, whole lifetimes, but to watch and wonder at 
the many-coloured, slowly- shifting stars. They saw the 
satellites of Jupiter without a telescope ; and by dividing 
up a few hundred revolutions of each satellite by the num- 
ber of nights of observation, they could arrive at its rate 
of motion to a minute of time. The strange diversity of 
names given to the constellations, the utter absence of 
any harmonious system in the zodiac or out of it, the 
purely fanciful and oftentimes inexplicable groupings of 
the principal stars, all go to show how many minds, in 
how many ages, helped the old astrology to assume the 
shape in which we know it now. 

Comets were a terror to the ancients because their 
shape suggested war, and their flaming glare pestilence, 
rushing through the sky like warriors with dishevelled 
hair, and always at some epoch of convulsion, either 
during the invasion of some bloody conqueror, or at the 
death of some great leader. Volcanoes were, for the same 
reason, or rather by the construction of the same unin- 
stmcted fancy, made the abodes of malignant deities, per- 
sonifications of those forces of nature not yet subjugated 
by man's intellect. High mountain-peaks, the inaccessible 
thrones of ice and snow, sources of thunder and lightning, 
avalanches, and devastating floods, became the homes of 
other gods, the enemies rather than the friends of man. 
But, above all, the all-devouring ocean inspired terror in 
the human breast, and this terror generated some of the 
widest-spread superstitions connected with the ancient 
mythologies. Serpent- worship, and Siva-worship, and 
devil-worship in general, can be distinctly traced to it, as 
I will show in a future lecture. The ship, which carried 
man, and the stars which guided him across the trackless 
sea, became personified into his favouring* deities, and 

* ' If, most venerable man ! it is a disgrace and sin to forget God, it 
is also a stain upon the virtue, and a dishonour upon the judgment, of 

3 



34 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 

thus astrology linked itself with physical geography, as 
astronomy has done in our day, to much better purpose. 

Let me touch, in passing, upon the curious etymology of 
the word 'star/ It is supposed to be explained by a 
Sanscrit root signifying to stand, in Latin stare, alluding, 
of course, to the immovable positions of the stars. But 
the use of the star-shaped diagram in astrology suggests 
another idea. The word for mountain is tor, expressed in 
writing by a triangle, our letter D, the Greek A.* The 
symbolic star with six points (for the heraldic star with 
five points is not a star at all, but a mullet or spur), was 

made by crossing two triangles )A (, and called the Sacred 

Tor, S'toe, and was used thus, abundantly, by the ma- 
gicians and cabbalists, as the background or framework of 
their horoscopes. It seems to be one of those numerous 
implantations of a later astrological mythology upon an 
older pyramid or mountain- worship, with which I should 
be loth just now to interrupt the subject of this lecture. 

Confining our attention to the group of sciences to which 
this lecture is devoted, it is plainly to be seen that their 
utterly embryonic condition in ancient times, and the ab- 
stract and cosmical character which they bear, make it 
unlikely that we can get from them many concrete facts 
respecting the earliest times of man. 

I will begin with the science of Numbers. From what 
we know of the notation of savage tribes of the present 
day, we may infer with great certainty some of the intel- 
lectual conditions of man's earliest residence upon the 
planet. I leave to the next lecture the question how long 
man has lived upon the earth. I take for granted also this 
evening that his first appearance was in an undeveloped 
condition of mind. The ideas of number which savages 
of the present day possess are strangely limited : some of 
the lowest tribes cannot count above three ; the Australians 

any one, who has virtue and judgment, not to reverence you, who are a 
very target of wonders, into which the stars, contending in your favour, 
have shot all the arrows of their gifts.' — Letter of Arretino to Michael 
Angelo, in Perkins 5 Tuscan Sculptors, vol. ii. p. 50. 

* See Rawlinson's picture of the hill Koukab ('the star') in his Baby- 
lon (about page 140). See also the fact that sb, a star -^- means not 
only to adore, but a gate (or door). Bunsen, p. 537, Egypt, vol. i., 7th 
determinative. 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 35 

count only to four, and after that all numbers are to them 
merely Kauwol-Kauwol, 'many/ or Bungu Galang, f very 
many/ Many stop at five ; others count up to ten before 
they begin again. The Sioux Indians, Dr Hayden tells 
me, count upon their ten fingers and their ten toes, and 
call that one man ; their first unit is therefore one, and 
their second unit is twenty. Pliny Chase has discussed this 
curious subject with great skill, to develope the funda- 
mental ideas of the numbers on the basis of the names 
which are given to them in many languages. He finds 
that their very names show how feeble the mathematical 
faculty of the savage must be. In some of these wild lan- 
guages even the word for three means two and one ; four 
means twice two ; five, three and two ; six and eight mean 
the second three or the second four, &c. 

Imagine, if you can, the barrier to mental development 
which such an embryonic notation must be. Think of the 
difference between making nine strokes, as the old Egyptian 
had to do, and writing our Arabic numeral 9. Progress in 
mathematical machinery was at first very slow ; yet our 
cypher 8 is merely a more convenient form of the old 

Egyptian ; " In some respects their notation seems 

simpler than ours, as when they represented 10 by (), 100 

by (D, 1000 by ^ , 10,000 by ^, 1,000,000 by 2) , and 

1,000,000,000,000,000,000 by 4*. 

But it was not really so ; for nothing can excel the utility 
and simplicity of our decimal system, unless it be a similar 
system with a decimal of 8, or 12, or 16, instead of 10. 
Any advance in true physical science was impossible in 
early times merely for want of some such counting machine. 
The first ages of humanity were devoted to darkness be- 
cause all numbers beyond a score or a hundred were alike 
uncountable. In fact, there is a natural dislike to mathe- 
matics in the untutored mind ; it brings too great a strain 
upon the intellect. You remember the Arab Sheik's reply 
to Layard's friend : — c Although I have passed all my days f 
in this place, I have neither counted the houses, nor in- 
quired into the number of the inhabitants. Shall we say, 



36 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 

Behold this star spinneth round that star, and this other 
star with a tail goeth and cometh in so many years ? Let 
it go ! God will guide it.' This of itself is sufficient to 
explain the reckless chronologies of early days, and the 
unblushing coolness with which thousands of years were 
, lavished on the reigns (or life-times) of half-a-dozen genera- 
/ tions. 

And yet, the occurrence of those immense numbers at 
the beginning of the Egyptian and Indian history hints to 
us the existence of some profound consciousness of an im- 
mense preceding antiquity, residing in the ancient mind. 
The old bards were aware that the race had been tens of 
thousands of years upon the earth, from considerations of 
architecture, and traditions, now lost, just as we have been 
made aware of it by considerations of a geological nature. 
Hence it was natural for them to make a rude calculation 
of the precession of the equinoxes, and fix the date of the 
beginning of the Egyptian empire at 35,000 years. 

Now it is in taking up such rude calculations of the an- 
cients, and making them more precise, and applying them 
with a cultivated common sense, that modern Mathematics 
and Astronomy find a chance to employ themselves about 
the question of the original conditions of our race. The 
discussions over the zodiac of Denderah, although they 
resulted in proving it to be a mere astrological diagram of 
no astronomical value whatever, and therefore useless to 
the historian, were still of use in opening up other and 
more fruitful resources. The fables of antiquity are often 
good ethnological guides, and some of these come within 
challenge of this mathematic group of sciences. 

Take for an example one of Kepler's most happy hits. 
It is rather too modern an instance, for it relates to an 
event dating less than 2000 years back. But it is a fine 
illustration of the treatment which the modern sciences 
are prepared to give to any ancient record that may be 
brought under their notice. Kepler was engaged in cal- 
culating backwards the orbits of our two largest planets, 
Saturn and Jupiter, when, to his astonishment and great 
delight, he saw that one of their conjunctions, and one of 
the very closest and most splendid that they had ever 
had, happened, under the most favourable circumstances 
for seeing it, precisely at the birth of Christ, as given in 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODERN. 37 

tlie books. Of course the legend of the star in the East 
was at once explained in its most essential features. 

In like manner, taking an example a few centuries 
farther back, the recalculation of the eclipse of Thales has 
become the starting-point of the chronologists in their 
rectification of the old Greek tables. 

Going back much farther, some of the most important 
Egyptian dates have been obtained by calculating the 
heliacal rising of Sirius, and other stars, watched by the 
Egyptians on account of their connection with that vitally 
interesting event to them, the beginning inundation of the 
Nile. Much of that old mythology receives an easy ex- 
planation in this way. 

I have just alluded to the use made of the precession of 
the equinoxes. A similar use is made of the ellipticity of 
the earth's orbit. A discussion is going on (at present) 
respecting the effect upon old climates, which a regular 
variation in the shape of the orbit of the earth must have 
produced. Laplace calculated the maximum and minimum 
of this ellipticity, and commenced the calculation of the 
length of time required to lengthen it out to its longest, 
and then to reduce it to its roundest, form. The subject 
has been taken up lately by others, to show that while 
the corrected mean distance of the earth from the sun is 
just now about 93 millions of miles, there must have oc- 
curred, at enormous intervals of time, periodically, such 
elongations and contractions of the orbit as to bring the 
earth during one season of the year within 85 millions of 
miles of the sun, and during another part of the year to 
carry it off 105 millions. This extreme ellipticity, how- 
ever, must take place in a different direction each time, so 
that the closeness of the earth to the sun will sometimes 
coincide with the summer of the northern hemisphere, and 
sometimes with its winter. When it coincides with sum- 
mer, then the northern hemisphere must suffer the most 
extraordinary variations of temperature, the absolute ex- 
tremes of both summer and winter, during which it is hard 
to see how human life could be successfully preserved 
upon the earth. Such was the glacial epoch — all the 
glacial epochs. On the other hand, when the earth re- 
cedes farthest during summer, and approaches nearest 
during winter, in the northern hemisphere, the amount of 



/ 



38 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES,, [LECT. 

"heat received from day to day from the sun must be almost 
invariable round the whole year. Then reigns perennial 
spring. Then animal and vegetable life holds its millennial 
holiday. Such was the carboniferous era — all the car- 
boniferous eras. 

I did not mean this evening to touch upon the geological 
antiquity of man, reserving that for the next lecture, but 
you will see at once that this astronomical question of 
the ellipticity of the earth's orbit bears directly and 
heavily upon the date of man's origin. If the last max- 
imum ellipticity happened, say 100,000 years ago, causing 
the last glacialism of the northern hemisphere, and if we 
can find any facts connecting that glacial condition of the 
earth with the remains of man, then the conclusions so 
derived must influence other lines of inquiry. And yet it 
is but one very little streak of light, mere candle-light, 
which astronomy throws in among the shadows of those 
Robin Hood and Robinson Crusoe days of mankind. 

2. Another such glimmer of poor information is furnished 
by Physical Geography, the marvellously zealous and pro- 
ductive pursuit of which, within the present century, bears 
to the geography of the ancients about the same propor- 
tions, which the results of modern astronomy bear to the 
dreams of ancient astrology. To feel the full force of this 
comparison you need only lay upon your table the poor 
little sketch-map of Ptolemy; then spread abroad upon 
your floor the sheets of the Swiss, French, Swedish, or 
British topographical surveys. In the former all is mon- 
strous and confused, not a latitude or longitude correct ; 
not a line or part of a line in any portion of it represent- 
ative of truth ; the small is large, the large is small ; and 
fancy fills up spaces where the scanty and untrustworthy 
reports of travellers have failed. In the latter every moun- 
tain-peak is established by a reference to some measured 
base line ; every stream is traced with compass and level 
up to its tiny rivulets; every man's possessions are de- 
fined as if the entire map was but a recorded deed of 
purchase ; his house, his garden, even the footpath which 
has at its stile the warning sign-board, ' beware of spring- 
guns/ is laid down. Four miles beyond the walls of the 
city of Bourges the geographers of France have erected 
a pyramidal monument which marks, with true French 



XI.] ANCIENT AND MODEKN. 39 

idealism but with French mathematical accuracy, the pre- 
cise centre of France as it was before the annexation 
of Nice and Savoy. At every mile along the southern 
boundary of Pennsylvania, Mason and Dixon planted pillars 
of stone which still remain. On the top of Mount Desert, 
Wachusett, the Blue Hill in Milton, and a thousand other 
eminences along the Atlantic seaboard, stand the remains 
of the heliotropes of Hassler, Bache, and Borden, their 
relative positions determined by hundreds of thousands of 
observations, to the fraction of a linear foot.* Russia and 
India are being mapped with the same accuracy and par- 
ticularity. Even the hideous deserts of Asia, and the 
hitherto inaccessible interior table-lands of Africa, are 
falling into shape under the analytical studies which 
Murchison and the men of the London Royal Geographical 
Society are incessantly making from the itineraries and 
sketches and astronomical observations of Mann and Liv- 
ingstone, Burton and Speke, and Grant and Barr, and the 
brothers Schlagintweit, and a hundred other daring ex- 
plorers, too many of whom have already paid the forfeit 
of their enthusiasm with their lives. 

We look in vain for any analogue of this accurate science 
in ancient days. 

It is true, Col. Vyse, Mr Turner, and the Astronomer 
Royal of Scotland, Mr Piazzi Smith, have published the 
most remarkable things concerning the great pyramid of 
Cheops. For, according to them, it must have been laid 
out, not by Benjamin Franklin's great-grandson, but by 
his great-grandfather, 250 generations removed. They 
find its base to be a precise aliquot part of the circumfer- 
ence of the earth. They find all its proportions to be geo- 
metrical and astronomical. The angle of its sides, the 
slope of its galleries, the distances from chamber to cham- 
ber within it they show to be obtainable by compass and 
scale. The granite chest in its central chamber, they say, 
is no sarcophagus : it is a vast standard bushel, containing 

* Eight hundred counties in the Northern States have been mapped 
so as to show every house and the owner's name ; and a complete set of 
these maps is preserved in the Library of the British Museum. 

The whole valley of the Mississippi has been crossbarred by the sur- 
veyors of the government of the United States at intervals of six miles, 
north and south, east and west. 



40 GENIUS OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES, [LECT. 

precisely four English quarterns of corn. And, more than 
all, they think they prove that the builders of this gigantic 
meter for all time must have come from a distance (per- 
haps from Mesopotamia), in search of some such place as 
Memphis, where the relations of latitude could come har- 
moniously in among the other geometrical relationships 
which were to be made constants for all science, in this 
pyramid.* 

However true all this may be, it goes but a short dis- 
tance towards our purpose. It is certainly equally true 
that no practical applications of such sequence, if it really 
existed, was ever made in ancient times on any scale de- 
serving of mention by a modern man. The maps which 
ancient Hindu and Chinese books contain are caricatures. 
The oceans, as we know them, were to the ancients a river 
coiled seven times round the entire world inhabited by man ; 
or, at best, a rim of water round an island continent, up from 
which, and down again into which, the sun and heavenly 
systems rose and sank from day to day. A few grand 
thinkers had indeed concluded that the earth was not a 
circular plate, but a globe hung in space : but nothing 
came of this conjecture but that which was in its turn con- 
jecture. The Chinese early knew the magnetic needle ; • but 
not how to work out their geography with it, in combina- 
tion with the telescope and spirit-level. Each traveller had 
a different story to tell: the geographer was bewildered 
with their contradictory reports. The skein could never 
be unravelled, because the beginning of it could not be 
found ; for the sine qua non of modern topography is a 
measured base to start with, and the ancients were not up 
to that, although their Euclid is our God of Cambridge. 
But Euclid is one of the moderns. 

It is a very great pity that the ancient world has left us 
no records of physical geography to compare with our own 
observations. Had we correct hypsometrical tables of the 
heights of the Alps as they were 5000 years ago, what 
light that would throw, not only upon the rate and amount 
of the submergence or emergence of the European Conti- 

* The beautiful applicatiou of physical science, in the double shape of 
the magnesium light and the sensitive photographic plate, to the elucida- 
tion of the ancient mysteries of the chambers and galleries of the great 
pyramid, should not be passed unnoticed. 



II.] ANCIENT AND MODEEN. 41 

nent, but upon the migrations of its early inhabitants. 
Eight centuries ago, for instance, those dangerous passes 
in the Alps, which the traveller now can hardly find a guide 
to pilot him through, were common highroads of communi- 
cation between the Swiss and the Italian villages. A suc- 
cession of cold seasons lengthens all the Swiss glaciers 
sensibly, and increases the privations of the mountaineers. 
There was a time when the isolated glaciers of the Alps 
formed one; covered the whole watershed; spread its edges 
over the low lands, filled up the lakes, banked against the 
Jura, and probably connected themselves with vast sheets 
of ice and snow around the world, to the detriment, if not 
to an almost complete destruction, of sections of the human 
race. The science of Meteorology, has much to teach us 
on this subject. Then there are all the questions of climate 
connecting themselves with the rise of mountains, the 
formation of new sea-currents by fresh volcanic submarine 
obstructions, and the spread and disappearance of great 
forests, all of them determining some fresh investigation 
into the earlier state of man, both in historic and in pre- 
historic times. 

What we most miss and need are ancient records of 
these physical changes. 

Had we even a rough outline of the delta of the Nile, 
made no farther back than the twelfth dynasty of the pyra- 
mid-builders, how much nearer we could come to the an- 
swer of that vexed question, whether Egypt was settled 
from Asia, or from Africa ; whether the black man or the 
white "man be the elder brother. If the Rig- Veda, instead 
of being a jumble of ceremonial hymns to fire and water, 
were a single tolerably well-constructed map of the valley 
of the Ganges, and the country behind the Sunderbunds, 
how much vain argument respecting the value of the Yug 
chronology and the antiquity of the Turanian tribes of 
the Ghauts and Deccan would have been saved ! All 
science, to become efficient, must become comparative ; 
this is its second stage. To settle the earliest history we 
need the combined efforts of comparative geography, com- 
parative zoology, and comparative philology. But compara- 
tive geography, or, as we usually call it, Physical Geography, 
which, after describing the present status of the earth's 
features, argues back to what they have been, and seeks 



42 GENIUS OP THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. 

out both the laws which governed the change, and the 
effects which it produced upon living beings, especially on 
man — Comparative Geography is, after all, only one phase 
of Geology. I will therefore close this lecture here, and 
promise to take up in the course of the next the points 
which have been just suggested. 

I shall discuss the Geological Antiquity of Man, as proved 
by his fossil remains, in connection with the relics of ex- 
tinct animals ; the proofs we have of great geographical 
changes during the human period ; the value of various 
scales of years which geologists have endeavoured to apply 
to the residence of man upon the earth, and the ground of 
the now commonly accepted division of antiquity into three 
definite periods — the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the 
Iron Age. And I shall endeavour to make these questions 
clear by diagrams to the eye, although I may not be able 
to make their answers wholly convincing to the judgment 
of my audience. 



43 



LECTURE III. 

THE GEOLOGICAL ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 

The antiquity of mankind, — the dignity of mankind, — 
the unity of mankind : — these are the three great prelimi- 
nary questions of ancient history. Three separate sciences 
take charge of them. The antiquity of mankind is a geo- 
logical problem. The dignity of mankind in the scale of 
nature is to be chiefly decided by zoology, or comparative 
anatomy. The moot question of the unity or diversity of 
the race begins the studies of the ethnologist. 

All three questions have been settled for us, as you are 
probably but too well aware, many centuries ago, by that 
' science falsely so called/ Theology. And it really seems 
to be a work of clear supererogation to commence the in- 
vestigation again. Are we not assured that the world is 
only about 6000 years old ? That man was made on the 
sixth day of its existence ? Does it not stand so written 
in the books of Moses ? Do we not also know that man 
was created upright before he fell, and of a grade but little 
lower than the angels ; and that his spirit goeth upwards, 
while that of the beast goeth downwards ? All this is too 
distinctly written by holy men of old, who wrote as they 
were moved by the Holy Ghost, to be called in question 
for a moment. Even the smallest particulars are put at 
the service of our curiosity to be received with implicit 
faith : — how that God made one Adam first ; then cast him 
into sleep, took from his side a rib and made a woman of it, 
and how, from these twain, sprang all nations, and peoples, 
and kindreds, and tongues, that dwell upon the surface 
of the whole earth, white and black, yellow and brown, 
dwarfish Esquimaux, and gigantic Patagonians, woolly- 
haired Melanesians and beautiful Greeks, Jews with great 
noses and Chinese with cat-like eyes, upon every con- 



44 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

tinent and in every remote island of the sea. The books 
of Moses are believed to inform us absolutely of these 
facts, in language as unmistakably plain as we could 
desire to have it; as plainly, in fact, as they inform us 
that the earth was made three days before the sun, thus 
settling for us the nebular hypothesis, and various other 
little difficulties, of an astronomical nature, which arise 
out of the rotation of the earth and planets, according to 
the Oopernican system. 

It is surprising how indifferent men of science seem to be 
to these great statements ! Thousands of preachers proclaim 
them from the pulpit every Sunday in the year; and 
millions of communicants respond — Amen ! And yet our 
men of science continue sceptical, and call them, as the 
apostles did, old-wives' fables. They believe them in- 
deed to be old Jew-legends, so palpably heathenish and 
contrary to all we now know, that it is not worth while to 
try to show their absurdity. But they add, more seriously, 
that these old fables are no part of Christian theology; 
that they have been foisted into the body of Christian 
divinity to save the brains of the silly, to sustain the 
tyranny of the clergy, and to excuse the vices of the 
laity; and that they are already disappearing frOm the 
public faith so fast under the influence of public school- 
education, that no especial notice need any more be taken 
of them. It is a noteworthy fact that the books which 
periodically appear in the shops upon the Harmony of 
Science and Eeligion, or upon the Eelations of Genesis to 
Geology, are written by clergymen ; and all of them in the 
service of Jewish theology. All alike, men of science will 
no longer even read them, but look with as despairing an 
eye upon those who write them as Christiana's party did 
upon the man whom they found asleep upon the enchanted 
ground. 

' And that place was all grown over with briars and 
thorns, excepting here and there where was an enchanted 
arbour,* upon which if a man sits, or in which if a man 
sleeps, it is a question, some say, whether ever he shall rise 
or wake again in this world. Over this forest therefore 
they went, both one and another, and Mr Greatheart went 

* Yiz. a pulpit. 



II J.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 45 

before, for that he was the guide; and Mr Valiant-for- 
Truth came behind, being rear-guard. Now they had not 
gone far, but a great mist and darkness fell upon them all. 
Wherefore they were forced for some time to feel for one 
another by words, for they walked not by sight. But any 
one must think that here was but sorry going for the best 
of them all ; but how much worse for the women and chil- 
dren, who both of feet and heart were but tender. They 
went on till they came to where there was an arbour, 
wherein lay two men whose names were Heedless and 
Too-bold. Then the guide did shake them, and do what 
he could to disturb them. Then said one of them, I will 
pay you when I take my money. At which the guide 
shook his head. I will fight so long as I can hold the 
sword in my hand, said the other. At that one of the 
children laughed/ 

Through this enchanted land men of science have learned 
to hurry on, without any longer even making such benevo- 
lent but futile efforts to awaken the sleepers in its arbours. 
Let us start fair this evening with the discussion of the 
first of the three problems which I have mentioned, viz. 
the geological antiquity of man. To do this we must make 
up our minds to part company with the schoolmen. There 
is no alliance possible between Jewish Theology and 
Modern Science. They are irreconcilable enemies. Ge- 
ology in its present advancement cannot be brought more 
easily into harmony with the Mosaic cosmogony than with 
the Gnostic, the Vedic, or the Scandinavian. It has 
escaped fully and finally from its subjection to the Creed. 
Sindbad has made the little red man of the sea, who sat 
so long on his shoulders, tipsy with new wine, tossed him 
to the ground, and crushed his wicked old head with a 
stone. Sindbad is free. Geologists have won the right 
to be Christians without first becoming Jews. 

The arguments for any geological fact, which is at all a 
comprehensive one, are gathered only by years of patient 
and laborious observation, not in the closet, but in the 
field, the cabinet and the laboratory. A thousand fruitless 
journeys before success can crown the search ! A thousand 
false hypotheses before the true theory is established ! A 
thousand mistakes of observation published before they 
can get corrected ! Consequently, the literature of the 



46 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

science is something enormous and appalling. Every new 
step in advance, while it becomes in one sense easier, in 
another sense becomes more difficult to make. Outsiders, 
charlatans, tyros, sciolists, have no chance at all. They 
must take everything on testimony. There was a time 
when the Dean of Westminster in his study could be a 
tolerable geologist. That time is past. No man who does 
not go out and grapple with nature, wrestling with this 
angel through the long dark night, receives the blessing 
when the sun is up. The knight who will take initiation 
into these mysteries, must make his vigil on the floor of 
the great church, equipped in full armour, fasting and 
alone, chaste, silent, brave. It is impossible for a mere 
reader of LyelPs Elements, or a mere listener to Sedge- 
wick's lectures, to get that profound faith, that overpower- 
ing conviction of the reality of former creations, and of 
their incalculably great antiquity, which is as natural to 
the working field-hand in palaeontology, as is his faith in 
the good God, or in his own past life. If I speak, there- 
fore, dogmatically, to-night, you will understand that the 
great first truths of Geology have been so seen and touched, 
and tasted, that they are no longer speculations, but expe- 
riences ; no longer objects of belief, but of absolute know- 
ledge. Geology is not in its infancy ; it has reached a ripe 
maturity. Its greater truths need no further testimony, 
no more copious illustration than they already have. And 
it is only of such that I will just now speak. Doubtful 
things will come up afterwards. 

Before touching the antiquity of man, I must give you 
a clear conception of the immense antiquity of the earth. 

If you see a stone house a-building, you know that the 
foundation walls were built first, and that the cut courses 
must have been laid in an ascending order. You know 
this with absolute certainty. The most direct outside re- 
velation from God could not make it plainer, nor add to 
the force of your conviction. Nor could the worker of a 
thousand miracles before your eyes shake this conviction 
for an instant. Now, Geology is the science of this convic- 
tion applied to the crust of the earth, as an unfinished build- 
ing of stone, the courses of which have been laid in suc- 
cessive days. It has its Metamorphic foundations, its 
Palaeozoic surbase story, its stately superstructure of Se- 



III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 47 

condary and Tertiary rocks, and its Volcanic pinnacles. 
The workmen with their tools are still upon its highest 
scaffolding. The forms of Lapithse and Centaurs fill all 
the metopes of its entablature. The pediment is even now 
receiving its Olympic synod in low and high relief. Created 
6000 years ago, and in a single day ! You might as well 
affirm that Coin cathedral was begun and finished before 
breakfast yesterday. You might as well believe that 
other oriental story of Aladdin's palace. 

Three points claim especial attention. The first point 
is the characteristic geological feature of superposition. 
The waters of the globe have been spreading 'one layer 
of sand and gravel over another, one layer of mud over 
another, one layer of limestone and marl over another, 
without intermission, without haste, with the greatest re- 
gularity, for many millions of years, until the whole thick- 
ness of such aqueous sediments as are known to us, 
amounts to no less than 16,000 fathoms, say 20 miles, from 
top to bottom. And when we remember that what we call 
the bottom of these sediments is no true bottom layer, but 
merely the lowest limit of our observations thus far pos- 
sible, we feel ourselves at liberty to carry back the era of 
commencement to an indefinite distance. 

The next point to be insisted upon is the division of the 
time, represented by this 20 miles of sediment, into four or 
five successive ages ; and the subdivision of each of these 
ages into successive systems ; each system into successive 
formations ; each formation into successive beds ; and each 
bed into laminse or fine layers, no thicker in some cases 
than a sheet of foreign letter-paper. All these different 
ages are as well characterized by distinctive features as 
the ages of architecture are by different styles. No tra- 
veller thinks of disputing with a local archaeologist while 
he is showing him the curiosities and beauties of a cathe- 
dral or abbey church, founded in one century, enlarged in 
another, partially rebuilt in another, and restored and 
beautified in his own day. There is no mistaking the 
Eoman age of the towers of Jumieges, nor the Norman 
age of its roofless nave, nor the later date of its ruined 
pointed Gothic choir. A glance is sufficient to decide that 
the facade of the Chateau de Galliou could not have been 
designed by any architect who lived when the baths of 



48 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

Nero were put up. So a glance from the stage-coach is 
sufficient for the experienced geologist to tell whether he 
be riding through an old Laurentian or Huronian region, 
or among Palseozoic mountains, or over the later estuary 
sands of the New Red, or over the still more modern plains 
of the Chalk and Greensand formations. And this char- 
acterization of sediments of different ages is carried out in 
nature so completely, and to such minuteness of detail, 
that the good local geologist can recognize, by the very 
surface soil and incidental shapings of the hill- sides, upon 
what particular belt of one formation he is riding, whether 
the rocks around him belong, for instance, to the Upper 
coal measures, or to the Lower ; to the upper, the middle,, 
or the lower Silurian. You can easily imagine what an 
impression of time this makes upon the thoughtful mind. 

The Hebrew legend of the creation describes the separa- 
tion of the waters from the dry land as having been de- 
termined by a creative act upon the third day, and fixed 
for all time. The fact is, that no fixed relation of land and 
water has ever been established for the surface of the globe. 
From the beginning land and water have been exchanging 
places. Every acre of the land-surface of the earth, which 
geology has examined, bears indubitable marks of having 
been not simply overflowed, but actually created at the 
bottom of the ocean. And it is needless for me to tell this 
audience what proofs we have that every part of every coast 
of every ocean is, this evening, while I say it, either rising 
slowly from the waters, or sinking slowly into them. Can 
any phenomenon enhance more highly than this our ideas of 
geological time ? Yet when we come to feel the full force 
of the terms Erosion, Denudation, as applied to the present 
surface of the earth, by which, through the slow wear and 
tear of centuries — millenniums — of fiery summer suns and 
wintry frosts, sedate glaciers and mad torrents, trickling 
rills and mouldering damps, sharp rootlets thrust in cracks 
and lichens softening the toughest rock, the very Alps 
have been wasted half away, and where once even mightier 
Alpine ranges ran, now nothing but a continent of rounded, 
grassy, forest-covered hills, remains; — still more, were I to 
give you proofs at hand of the repetition of this work in 
all the past ages of the world, and show you the wasted 
outlines of hills and valleys in the inside of the crust itself, 



III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN, 49 

fossil erosions, hills and valleys embedded like bones and 
shells under whole formations of rock sediment,— you 
would begin to feel the overwhelming weight of geological 
time, and be disposed to cry— 'Tis but another name for 
an eternity. 

. I might illustrate this subject of erosion by many 
beautiful instances,— such as ravines a thousand feet deep 
through prismatic lava fields ; caves which were once but 
one, now separated by a river with cliff walls; fissures 
filled with what was once rock-oil, afterwards dried into a 
vein of bituminous coal, and now exposed to view on both 
sides of a wide deep valley. If anything has taken time 
it has been this mouldering down of the successive surfaces 
of the planet. 

The third point of prime importance is one that brings 
us close to the subject of our lecture. Every geological 
age has had its own different and special inhabitants, — its 
successive creations of life-forms. Each geological system, 
even each successive formation, has entombed the remains 
of millions of zoophites, plants and animals, peculiar to 
that particular stage of the earth's history, and to no 
other. I say nothing now of any supposed progression of 
ideas in the creative intelligence embodied in these forms : 
this would come in better* shape before us in the next 
lecture. I argue nothing here for or against the theory of 
instantaneous creation ; or the opposite theory of spon- 
taneous development of one set of forms out of another. I 
wish to confine your attention just now to the established 
fact, that no geologist can possibly mistake Silurian rocks 
for Devonian, or Devonian for Permian, or Permian for 
Cretaceous, or Cretaceous for Postpleiocene, when he has 
once caught sight of even only a small collection of their 
fossils. Nature is no Brummagem manufacturer of old 
Greek coins or Pharaonic scarabasi to be re-sold to travel- 
lers at the foot of the Pyramids, or in the great hall at 
Carnac. In fact, as if to prevent the possibility of such 
deception, the truth-loving Creator has marked shells of 
similar shapes,* but of different ages, with such delicate but 
unmistakable variations of detail, that we must stand more 
and more amazed, not only at the infinite resources, but 

. * E.g. the microscopic dentation discovered by Agassiz in the interior 
lamellae of one of two shells in all outward respects undistinguishable. 

4 



50 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

at the inflexible integrity of his skill. Surely lie designed 
that men should not deceive themselves. 

Do you not see what a mistake was made by the fine 
old Hebrew poet who sang the Mosaic song when he 
separated the creation of the land and waters, from the 
creation of the fish and air-breathing animals, fixing the 
former on the third day, and the latter on the fifth and 
sixth ? But let us do him justice. His is a poem, not a 
text-book. He could only see the phenomena of the world 
in the twilight of his times; but his genius grasped them, 
even thus half seen, in a poetic order, wonderfully like the 
actual. Nor was it possible for him to describe them, 
complicated as they are in nature. With the same ample 
grandeur, but without the horrors that surround the circu- 
lar stages of Dante's Hell, he has resumed under seven 
heads the wonders of the universe ; and the order of 
ascending worth which they bore in -his own mind tallied 
with that which in the Divine idea compelled the suc- 
cessive stages of development in the history of the earth. 

Conceive now the illimitable stretch of ages upon ages, 
occupied in the production, establishment, increase, de- 
cline, extinction, and substitution, of these grand ranges 
of successive worlds of vegetable and animal organisms, 
all perfect in themselves, all differing from one another, 
all harmonizing with the growing physics of the planet, 
and leading slowly, but surely, up to man. Could God 
have made all this at once ? I speak not of a puckish, 
brutal Demiurge, fond of such practical jokes ; he could. 
I speak of the Christian's Cod of truth, the loving ' Father 
who is in heaven/ Would it not have been a flagrant 
imposition upon intelligence, — a complicated and most 
flagitious forgery ? Heaven could scarcely have devised 
such a barmecide feast to set before the hungry intellect 
of man. 

Nor is the difficulty diminished by calling a day a thou^ 
sand years. We have in palseontology the records of a 
thousand ages. Many of the old limestone strata are en- 
tirely made up of corals, and their triturated debris. Some 
of the old Devonian mud-rocks are mere masses of the 
casts of brachiopods, of every size from the youngest to 
the oldest. Some of the coal-measure shales are leaved 



III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 51 

like a book, and every leaf glistens with delicate* fresh- 
water shells. In the Deep-river basin of North Carolina 
millions of fish-teeth lie packed away between two layers 
of coal which lie but two feet apart. There are more than 
a hundred beds of coal in a single coal-system, each of 
which is the result of the growth of a peat-bog, swamp, 
and forest, of a separate age ; to say nothing of the many 
fathoms of rocks which intervene between each one coal-bed 
and the next in order over it; during which long interval 
of time the land must have been too deep beneath the 
water level to permit of vegetation.* The fossil dung of 
the fish which swam the seas during the deposition of the 
chalk of England, was so abundant, that the farmers about 
Cambridge collect it, as it is set free from the mother-rock 
by denudation, and use it to manure their lands. 

Professor Heer, of Zurich, has lately published, in his 
admirable Geology of Switzerland, a minute history of one 
single formation, only 36 feet thick, which he divides into 
18 beds. It tells a striking story of change and time, 
which we need only multiply by thousands to get some 
adequate notion of the antiquity of the earth. 

Until about 30 years ago the great geological question 
for those who busied themselves with the higher problems 
of life was this : Why do not the remains of man appear 
among the fossil treasures of the earth ? Here the theo- 
logians always had the geologists upon the hip. If the 
earth is so old, they triumphantly clamoured, why does not 
man share in its antiquity ? Show us a fossil human bone 
— a fragment of his skull ; a single tooth will satisfy us, if 
it be imbedded fairly in one of your fossiliferous rocks. 

To this there was but one reply : Wait ! 

The ethnologists, the archaeologists, the egyptologists, 
were in the same predicament, and shared to some extent 
in the embarrassment of the paleontologists. They had 

* There are reasons, in my opinion, to believe that many of the inter- 
vals, where they consist of sand, were rather raised above than lowered 
into the water. The calamites, rooted at different heights in the sandy 
strata of the Glass Bay coast of Cape Breton, seem to argue in that di- 
rection. Either emergence or submergence would necessarily put a stop 
to a coal-bed's growth. Probably both explanations are equally admissible 
in their proper places. 



52 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

found human skeletons in ancient caves, mixed with bones 
of animals, some of them foreign to the countries in which 
the caves existed. But there was no date to be assigned 
with any certainty to these ossuary deposits ; there was no 
proof positive that they were not swept into these caves by 
comparatively modern freshets. It was easy to assert, and 
hard to disprove, that the caves were not the habitations, 
or at all events places of refuge, for the early races of man- 
kind, and that these fed upon the animals whose bones 
were mixed with their own skeletons; or, on the other 
hand, the caves might have been the dens of hyenas, whose 
bones were found in some of them in great numbers ; and 
it was reasonable to suppose that these predatory creatures 
might have added human victims to the other evidences of 
their omnivorous rapacity. The whole phenomenon was 
one of such complexity and difficulty that it required a long 
examination. These caves were discovered one by one in 
England, in France, in Sicily, in Brazil, in fact, in all coun- 
tries which, contain limestone regions. They are very nu- 
merous ; they differ much in the number, kind, proportion, 
and condition of their fossils ; but they almost all agree in 
one principal feature — their bones are preserved from at- 
mospheric decomposition by deposits of carbonate of lime, 
slowly introduced by the infiltration of waters through their 
roofs, forming stalactites above, and a floor of stalagmite, 
which covers a red earth, in which the bones are buried. 
The bones of man were rare compared with those of other 
animals ; but, on the other hand, the instances of the dis- 
covery of marks of t)iG presence of mtm were numerous, and 
the number of stone and flint implements collected from 
all the caves was very great. Yet it is not too strong an 
affirmation, that after all the researches of Buckland and 
Lyell, and Tournal and Schmerling, no one was satisfiel 
how the thing would turn out ; what the age of the caves, 
or of their contents, might be ; or what relation the human 
relics really might bear to the remains of animals with 
which they were intermixed, or to the geological sequence 
of aqueous formations constituting the crust of the earth. 
The individual explorers had their own opinions, but the 
world of science, watching their labours, was not satisfied. 
Buckland published his Reliquiae Diluvianse in 1823, in 
which, he discussed the whole subject of organic forms 



III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAX. 53 

found in the caves, the fissures, and the gravel-beds of 
England, and concluded that the human remains which he 
had found therein were not so old as the accompanying 
fossils. It was a theological conclusion, and was accepted 
with delight by the conservative science of England. In- 
deed, it remained a shibboleth of geological orthodoxy in 
England until about seven years ago,* when the acceptation 
of a new series of discovered facts on the Continent broke 
down the bigotry of the British school, and a general 
stampede of the younger geologists took place to the other 
side of the question. 

In 1828, that is, five years after the appearance of 
Buckland's book, two French gentlemen in the south of 
France, MM. Tournal and Christol, examined and re- 
ported on fbone caves atBize, and at Pondres nearMsmes, 
in the Valley of the Gard. They had found human bones 
and teeth, fragments of pottery in two styles, pointed 
bones and flint hatchets and arrow-heads, cemented in a 
mud breccia with living land shells, and the remains of both 
recent and extinct animals, such as the hyena, rhinoceros, 
stag, antelope, goat, Lithuanian Aurochs and Lapland 
reindeer, the last of which is almost everywhere found 
associated with the mammoth of France in ancient allu- 
viums and cavern muds. These gentlemen also thought 
they perceived unmistakable evidences of a time arrange- 
ment, or stratification of the remains, such as quite set 
aside the idea that the human relics were introduced 
subsequently.^ 

But there were Bucklandites in France also. M. 
Desnoyers pointed to the Druid tumuli and dolmens of 
the primitive inhabitants of Gaul, under which he had 
found quantities of such flint hatchets and arrow-heads, 
pointed bones and coarse pottery, mingled with the sacri- 

* Although Priest M'Enery had early found flint tools under stalag- 
mite in Kent's Hole, near Torquay ,• and Godwin Austen had published 
in Trans. Geol. Soc. (vi. 1842), flints widely distributed in loam under 
the Kent's Hole stalagmite. In 1858 the new Brixham Cave was ex- 
amined by the Hoyal Society, and made Prestwich and Falconer antedi- 
luvianists. 

f Annales de Chimie et de Physique, p. 161, 1833, Christol. Notice 
sur les ossements humains des cavernes du Gard. Montpellier, 1S29, 

% Lyell, Antiq. of Maa, chap. iv. 1863. 

c 



54 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

ficial bones of deer, sheep, dogs, wild boars, oxen, and 
horses ; but no elephant, rhinoceros, hyena, tiger, or other 
extinct species found in caves, had ever shown that these 
aboriginal Celts had been their contemporaries.* 

In 1833 appeared the great work f of Dr Schnierling of 
Liege, in Belgium, who had been devoting several years 
to the exploration of forty caverns in the valleys of the 
river Meuse, the stalagmite floors of which had never 
before been broken up. Here, mingled indiscriminately 
with extinct bear, hyena, elephant, and rhinoceros, and 
modern beaver, cat, wildboar, roebuck, hedgehog, and 
wolf, above them and below them; and in the same degree 
of preservation in all respects he found the rolled and 
scattered bones of men. None of the common marks of 
burial were seen. None of the bones were gnawed, as if 
by animals. No coprolites, or fossil dung, of predatory 
beasts were found ; the caves had not been dens. . The 
osseous stratum was an undoubted aqueous deposit, 
brought into the caverns, through fissures communicating 
with the surface. Thousands of snail shells, and one 
snake, a few fresh-water fish-bones, and the bones of 
several birds, led to the same conclusion. 

In the Engis cave, eight miles S.W. of Liege, fragments 
of three human bodies (chiefly skulls) were found. The 
now celebrated Engis skull lay buried, five feet deep, in 
the mud beneath the alabaster covering, along with a 
rhinoceros tooth and reindeer bones. 

In the Engihoul cavern opposite, remains of at least 
three bodies were discovered, chiefly belonging to the arms 
and le'gs. 

The Chokier cavern, two and a-half miles S.W. of 
Liege, afforded many fragments of the bodies and limbs of 
bears, but skulls were rare ; in other caves bear- skulls 
were numerous, and trunk and limb bones rare ; at Goffon- 
taine all parts were in proportion. In the Chokier cave he 
found a polished bone needle with a hole pierced through 
its base for an eye. Another cut bone was found in the 

* Desnoyer, Bull, de la Soc. Geol. ii. 252. And S. Y. Caverne, Diet. 
Univ. d'Hist. Nat. Paris, 1845. 

f "Reclierches sur les ossements fossiles decouverts dans les cavernes 
de la Provinee de Liege, 1833-1834. 



III.] ANTIQUITY OP MAN. 55 

Engis cave ; and rude flint instruments, distributed through 
red loam, were common in all the other caves. 

Mankind were obviously then contemporary with the ex- 
tinct carnivora and pachyderms. So much was certainly 
made out. But still, it had not been proved that these 
tropical creatures had ever lived in Europe. Schmerling 
imagined therefore (that panacea for all geological difficult- 
ies) a cataclysm or deluge, of undetermined date, which 
had swept their bodies over from Africa, to bury them upon 
the shores of the Northern seas. Whether they had first 
been left as a diluvial deposit on the surface of the land, 
and afterwards found their way into the caves, he did not 
undertake to determine. And he still further puzzled the 
whole question by asserting, that among the various re- 
mains of other animals, he had found those of the South 
American agouti, which, however, afterwards turned out 
to be those of an extinct species of French porcupine. 

Eight more years parsed in fruitless speculation ; during 
which the patient Belgian continued to be let down by 
ropes from the top of the crags, which make the valleys of 
the Meuse the most picturesque in the world, and to crawl 
on his hands and knees, pick in hand, through the drip- 
ping caves and fissures, which penetrate the Devonian 
limestone in every direction; visited by geologists and 
archasologists, from all parts of Europe, who could only 
tell him stories of similar discoveries, made by themselves 
in other regions, but nothing new ; nothing to shed light 
upon his splendid cabinet; nothing to solve the riddle by. 
Then Isis smiled upon her puzzled priests, lifted another 
corner of her veil, and made a new suggestion. The 
answer to the conundrum began to shape itself at last in 
intelligible words. 

It was now 1841, when an old antiquary, walking out 
from his chateau in the little city of Abbeville, through 
which the highway runs from Boulogne-sur-mer to Paris, 
where it crosses the river Somme, watched one day work- 
men shovelling gravel from the quarries on the heights 
beyond the city walls. Among the fantastic forms of 
flint which they threw out, his quick, experienced eye 
detected, as he thought, one that looked unnatural. He 
picked it up and looked at it more carefully. Could he be 
mistaken ? Had he not seen such in cabinets of anti- 



58 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

quities ? The more lie looked at it tlie more lie was con- 
vinced that it had been tampered with; in fact, manu- 
factured by the hands of man. Yet how could that be ? 
He asked the workman to show him the exact spot from 
which it had been shovelled. It was a bed of waterworn 
and broken flints, deep beneath the surface, covered by a 
deposit of loam, several yards in thickness.* None of the 
other flints showed the same marks. They were rounded, 
except where broken across, knobbed like potatoes when 
they grow in a bunch attached together, and coated with a 
crust of dull white substance due to the decomposition of 
their surfaces. The piece he held in his hand, on the con- 
trary, was of a regular shape, chipped to an edge on both 
sides, and brought to a point at one end by the loss of a 
multitude of little flakes, such as no attrition or percussion 
in running waters could possibly effect. The other end 
was round and still retained the dull white crust which 
characterized the unmanufactured flints among which it 
had lain embedded. He took it home. He went into his 
museum. He compared it with stone hatchets, arrow- 
points, spear-heads, chisels, and pointed tools of various 
kinds which he had got from the Druid barrows and dol- 
mens of Normandy. There was no mistaking its resem- 
blance to these works of human art, some of which were 
more carefully prepared, and were even polished ; but 
others of them were quite as rude as the one' which he had 
found, f 

Here then was a discovery ! But he was enough of a 
geologist to see all its difficulties. He must be still more 
sure that it was a genuine inhabitant of that bed of flints 
beneath the bed of loam. Nay, his specimen would be 
laughed to scorn if he presented it to the learned world 
by itself. All the world would say that he had dropped it 

* Eor a section and description of this famous locality, see Lyell's 
Ant. of Man, p. 135. See Prestwich's section of the valley in the 
Journal of Geol. Soc„ London. For section of description of Menche- 
court quarries see Proceedings of Amer. Phil. Soc, 1864. 

f There are also deeper cavities flaked out for the ends of the thumb 
and index finger to be noticed in many of these tools, while some are 
shown in this way to have been used alternately or at pleasure by grasp- 
ing either end. — See also Mr Ramsay's testimony, in Lyell's Antiquity of 
Man. 



III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. . . 57 

accidentally from his pocket in among the debris "of the 
quarry, even if politeness or good nature prevented a more 
damaging insinuation. Perhaps some workman had 
picked it up upon the surface of the ground, and dropped 
it in the quarry. All cabinet collectors know how often 
specimens get into wrong boxes. All geologists know 
how easy it is to mistake the situation of a fossil. He 
must find more of them, or say nothing more about it. 

For six long years Boucher des Perthes became as 
sedulous a hanger-on about the quarries in the valley of 
the Somme, as any seedy old nobleman in the Quartier 
Latin about the Luxembourg. And he was rewarded. As 
the workmen advanced the headings of their pits, and 
opened back the flint bed, which had the loam above it 
and the solid chalk below it, the antiquary stood by (or his 
servants for him when he was sick), and selected out the 
manufactured flints, one by one as they appeared. He fed 
the workmen themselves to vigilance. When a flint in- 
strument appeared they would leave it in its place and 
send for the old crazy man, as they thought him, to come 
from the city and take it out of its long resting-place him- 
self. The number thus obtained was immense. At last 
he could contain his knowledge no longer. He took a 
thousand of them up to Paris, and showed them to the 
'Academicians. But what did these men know ? It was a 
favourite jest of a French wit that all the science of the 
Royal Academy of France was in the head of its 41st 
member. It had but 40 members. Boucher des Perthes 
was as much the old crazy man at Paris as at Abbeville. 

In 1847 he published the first volume of his great book, 
Antiquites Celtiques, in which he gave a full account of 
his discoveries, calling them antediluvian, because they 
were made in the bottom layers of what all geologists had 
called the great Diluvium, or Diluvial Drift, taking their 
terminology from the science of the Middle Ages, based 
on the stories of the Sacred Scriptures of the Jews. His 
account produced no impression. It was puzzling enough 
to solve the riddle of the caves ; this man had proposed a 
still more tremendous problem : how the remains of man 
came to be buried in the rocks themselves. The easiest 
way was to ignore the whole affair. Some denied that the 
tools were anything more than natural fragments. Others 



58 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

denied that they were found 30 feet beneath the surface. 
Elie de Beaumont, the disciple of Cuvier, and the head of 
the geologists in France, reasserted Cuvier' s opinion that 
the old gravel-beds of the valley of the Somme had 
slipped down the hill-sides to their present situation; 
therefore he did not care whether the flints were manu- 
factured or not ; whether they were found 30 feet below 
the surface or not. The quarries were only worked in 
winter ; nobody in his senses would leave Paris in winter- 
time to prove the assertions of a provincial antiquarian, 
whose whole story was improbable, and if true would 
upset all preconceived opinions. Even Dr Rigollet, who 
lived in the same valley, at Amiens, not 30 miles from 
Abbeville, and who had written in 1819 a memoir on the 
fossil mammalia of the valley, took no pains to verify his 
neighbour's facts for more than three years after the 
Antiquites Celtiques appeared in press, but denied them 
heartily, until he one day paid Boucher des Perthes a 
visit, and returned to his own home only to find similar 
evidences of man's early existence in its immediate 
vicinity ; nor did he publish his recantation for four more 
years, after he had made a large collection for himself. 

And so the matter rested. Boucher des Perthes went 
on collecting specimens, and enlarging and arranging his 
cabinet, biding his time. It came at last. He is now the 
great man of the day in geological archaeology ; for, like 
Linnaeus, and Cuvier, and Lavoisier, and Hunter, he has 
started one of the sciences on a new career. Let no man 
doubt his own genius ! it is the suicide of immortality ! 

The final impulse came at last, not from Germany, the 
land of abstract ideas, nor from France, the land of wit 
and mathematics, but from conservative, plodding, snob- 
bish, prosaic old England, the land of tardy, ungraceful, 
but staunch, indomitable love of justice and the truth. 

It had got to be now 1858, when the mouth of a new bone- 
cave was discovered at Brixham,* five miles west of the old 
Kent's Hole,t and the Royal Society deputed its two most 

* Three or four miles west of Torquay. 

f One mile east of Torquay. In this cave Priest M'Enery had found 
about 1830, in red loam under stalagmite, mammoth, tichorine rhinoceros, 
cave bear, &c. &c, with flint ; and Lyell thinks he was only prevented by 
his respect for Euckland from expressing then his conviction that these 
were contemporary fossils. (Note on p. 97 of Lyell' s Ant. of Man.) 



III.l ANTIQUITY GP MAN. . 59 

famous diluvial fossil hunters, Mr Prestwich arid Dr 
Falconer (returned from a glorious career in India, and 
now, alas, lost to us, just as he had become one of the 
masters in our Israel), to examine it. They came, — they 
saw, — and they were conquered. The united length of 
five galleries, cleared and examined, was several hundred 
feet. Their width nowhere exceeded eight feet. Some- 
times they were filled to the very roof with gravel, bones, 
and mud, the latter always covered with stalagmite, from 
1 to 15 inches thick, itself sometimes containing bones, 
e. g. a perfect antler of a reindeer, and an entire humerus 
of a bear. The loam or bone -earth under it was from 1 to 
15 feet in depth. The gravel at the bottom contained no 
relics, and was sometimes more than 20 feet in depth. 
No human bones were found, but many flint knives, chiefly 
in the lowest part of the red loam, one of the most perfect 
having 13 feet of bone-dirt over it, and some of them found 
directly underneath the extinct forms embedded in the 
stalagmite covering, and therefore necessarily of an older 
age. To add certainty to the date, a perfect knife was 
found close to and on a level with the left hind-leg of a 
cave-bear, which had all its parts arranged in such complete 
order, that they must have been held together by the tis- 
sues, when they were floated into their resting-place be- 
side the knife. 

One more step taken, and Boucher des Perthes was vindi- 
cated and revenged. The step had to be taken. The ex- 
plorers could not help noticing that the country about the 
Brixham cave had suffered great changes to permit the cave 
to be thus filled. The valleys had been lowered at least 60 
feet since the introduction of the gravel to the cave. Then, 
a strong stream ran through it, rolling stones along. As 
the waters became more quiet the red mud was deposited; 
finally, the alabaster drippings had their day, interrupted 
by recurrences of rainy eras, of unknown duration. The 
geological age of the deposit was therefore immense.* 

Dr Falconer, shortly afterwards, on his way to Sicily, 
stopped at Abbeville, and wrote to Mr Prestwich that 
it was now high time to do something about the much-dis- 

* See Lyell's discussion of the change of climate, based on the character 
of the Ci/rena flumi/ialis, and of the change of sea level, Ant. Man, pp. 
143, 177. 



60 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

puted flints of Boucher des Perthes. Immediately a crowd 
of people, John Evans, Mr Flower, Sir Charles Lyell, 
Prof. Eogers, Mr George Pouchet, M. Gaudry, M. Hebert, 
Desnoyers, Quatrefages, everybody, now rushed down to 
Abbeville, to St Acheul, to Rouen, and to other places in 
the valley of the Somme, to pick out flint implements with 
their own hands from the diluvium. Soon a trade sprung 
up between the quarrymen and travellers of all kinds. 
The demand began to exceed the supply. The workmen 
made experiments, and finding themselves as good as 
savages, forged ancient knives with modern hammers out 
of the diluvial flints. The cabinets of Europe and America 
became stocked from Moulin Quignon and Menchecourt, 
and the whole valley of the Somme fell once more into 
disrepute. 

But the whole thing was now un fait accompli. People 
were at last convinced that man was no exception to the 
fossil world. Englishmen, who had fought so long against 
the ante- diluvial age, spread themselves through the libra- 
ries of Oxford and Cambridge, and over the bogs and deltas 
and downs of Great Britain, only to discover similar worked 
flint deposits in diluvium with extinct animal remains, in 
many places themselves, and records of such discoveries 
by others more than two centuries before. 

A new impetus also was imparted to the exploration of 
new caves, which is still carried on with unabated energy 
and fine results. I have already tasked your patience too 
severely this evening to impose upon you further, even a 
rude sketch of what these last seven years have produced : 
the labours of Lartet in the south of France ; the discovery 
of the Neanderthal skull ; the explorations carried on in 
the lake villages of Switzerland; the cleaning out of a 
great fissure in the Gibraltar mountain, and the curious 
skeletons found therein ; the discovery of human bones in 
the diluvium of Abbeville ; * the claim of Desnoyers to 

* For the discussion on the jaw, see Quatrefages in the Contes Rendus 
Lyell, Vogt, &c. In the Bullet. Soc. Geologique de Prance, xxviii., Nov., 
Dec., 1864, p. 93, M. de Mercey refers to the discovery of the jaw, 28th 
March, 1863, and subsequent discoveries by Boucher des Perthes of others 
at the base of the diluvium and in the top sand-layers. He adds that he 
himself, with Dr Dubois and M. Buteux, saw others taken out from the base 
of the deposit, July 16th, 1864; and with Boucher des Perthes, Dubois, 
and Rene Yion, Sept. 27th, 1864, a metacarpal bone and left index per- 



HI.] ANTIQUITY OP MAN. 61 

the determination of tertiary human relics, far older than 
the post-tertiary flint instruments of St Acheul and Abbe- 
ville.* Some of these topics should come up again in my 
next lecture, on the comparative dignity of man. 

But I cannot close to-night without making certain that 
the gist of the question, of man's comparative antiquity, 
is clearly understood. It is not a question of a definite 
number of years. No geologist pretends to fix an exact 
date to any event in geology. It is one of the comparative 
sciences, essentially so. The difference between tertiary 
and post-tertiary counts for almost nothing in the entire 
column of formations which compose the crust of the earth, 
as the tabular view next page will show. Yet it is immense, 
enormous, shocking to the mind of man when applied to 
his historic life on earth. It is considered a triumph of 
discovery when we succeed in finding a reptile, or a fish, 
or a plant, in a subordinate formation only one degree 
older than the oldest stratum in which as yet we have dis- 
covered it. The whole creation has seemed as if creeping 
backward, — downward in the column of rocks, backward 
in the ages, — by such discoveries, annually, nay, daily, 
made by that busy crowd of lonely explorers whom, if we 
had Uriel's eyesight, we might see creeping, and climbing, 
and hammering, and picking, and pocketing for home* ex- 
amination, note-book in hand, dispersed all over the civil- 
ized, and here and there to be descried in the most remote 
corners of the uncivilized, world. These men are poets, 
working out the rhymes and the rhythm of that great 
psalm of life, which is to be sung in chorus when all work 
is done ; when the young men will have much to say to 

fectly preserved, ascribed by Gaudry to an adult man of ordinary size. 
His whole paper, pp. 69—104, is full of interest ; it is entitled, Note sur 
les elements du terrain quaternaire aux environs de Paris, et specialement 
dans le bassin de la Somme ; par M. N. de Mercey. It is illustrated with 
numerous excellent sections, &c. Also Troyon'sL'homme Possile, p. 30. 
* I say nothing of the human pelvis found at Natchez, and too confidently 
accepted by Sir'Charles Lyell (p. 200), because grave doubts still hover 
about its authenticity. Bat while putting these pages to press the news 
from Paris was received that at the meeting of the International An- 
thropological Society in that city in August of this year, ' two memoirs 
due to the Abbe Bourgeois and "the Abbe Delaunay have established be- 
yond doubt, that man was already in existence at the epoch of the Lower 
Pleiocene.'— See also Ly ell's discussion of the Lava Man of Denise (Ant. 
Man, p. 194). 



62 



THE GEOLOGICAL 



[lect. 



LyelVs Tabular View of the Fossiliferous Strata. 



1 
2 
3 
4 
5 
6 
7 
8 
9 

10 
11 
12 
13 
14 
15 
16 
17 
18 



Recent 
Post-pliocene 
Newer-! 1 . 
Older- }P ll0celle 

Upper-1 . 

T rr S>miocene 

Lower-J 

Upper- I 

Middle- feocene 

Lower- J 

Maestricht beds 

" White chalk 



[•Post-tertiary. 



► Tertiary or Cainozoic. 



Lower-J 

Upper-1 

Gault > green sand 

Lower- J 

Wealden 

Purbeck beds 

Portland stone 

19 Kimmeridge clay 

20 Coral rag 

21 Oxford clay 

22 Great Bath-1 r , 

23 Inferior- j° ollte 

24 Lias 

25 Upper- 

26 Muschelkalk 

27 Lower- 



!>Cretaceous 



Secondary or 
Mesozoic. 



Jurassic 



•Triassic 



28 Magnesian limestone or Permian 

29 Coal measures 1 n , .? 

on n -u -e r a ^Carboniferous 

Si) Carboniferous limestone J 

82 Lo^etJDe-ian 

33 y P per-| giluriaii 
o4 Lower-j 

35 ypper-| 0ambrian?==Hnroiliflll 

oo Lower-J 

38 Swerl} Laurentian 



Primary or 
Palaeozoic. 



* Antiquity of Man, p. 7. 
complete the column. 



The Huronian and Laurentian are added to 



III.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 63 

the prophets that will astonish them. And nothing will 
more astonish them than what they shall hear sung of the 
antiquity of the race which they belonged to, and glorified, 
but which they imagined had been created only two or 
three thousand years before their individual selves. 

I said, no scale of years ! I must modify the expression. 
I should have said no scale of years in a condition to be 
used. Imagine a corps of detectives, belonging to the 
secret police, excited by the news of the commission of 
some masterpiece of felony, and stimulated by profes- 
sional zeal, ambition, and the hopes of a large reward, who 
have come upon the trail of the criminals, have found 
traces of their work, have collected a little heap of letters 
torn into minute fragments by the rascals, and are now 
sitting round a table sorting the tiny shreds, all crumbled 
up and half illegible with lying in the mud. See them 
examine piece after piece and utter a suppressed exclama- 
tion when they detect a part of a word that they can 
recognize ! See them lay the ragged edges of a dozen of 
them together and shift and turn them about until they fit 
and form a larger piece ! See them hand jJieir odd pieces 
across the table to each other, that what one man cannot 
use another may be more fortunate with ! Until the hours 
go by, and the documents begin to assume a form, and 
the handwriting begins to make sense, and the key is got, 
and they break up the midnight party, tired, but jolly, 
and masters of the evidence that shall hang the rogues ! 

Such, if you will believe it, is the condition of the scale 
of years, which (originally, perfect and abundant evidence 
of the work which sunlight and moon-attraction have 
been doing on the surface of the earth) has been all torn 
to pieces, defaced and covered up by the same cunning 
sun and moon, — is now being picked up and washed and 
put together and restored by the geologists. The rings 
of bark in trees submerged in deltas ; the rain-drop, 
worm-trail, footstep impressions, left on the thin laminae of 
tidal estuary mud ; the growth of peat in ditches cut for 
fuel at the present day; the wear and tear of basaltic 
columns against which abut the arches of a Roman bridge ; 
the number of lava currents and intervening vegetable 
moulds over buried cities ; the height of belts of teredo 
holes around the columns of Jupiter Serapis at BaiaB ; the 



64 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

annual rate of emergence of well-known boulders in the 
waters of the Gulf of Bothnia, and of submergence of the 
missionary villages of Greenland;* the measurement of 
the three arches of black mould in the railway cutting 
through the cone of the Tiniere in the Canton de Yaud, 
the upper arch containing iron relics of the Roman age, 
the middle arch containing bronze relics of the copper age, 
and the lowest arch containing only hammers and arrow- 
heads of the stone age, and calculated by Morlot to be 
from 5000 to 7000 years old ; the rate of growth of suc- 
cessive layers of cypress forests found in probing the plain 
of New Orleans; the rate of growth of the concentric 
coral reefs of Florida ; the annual rate of increase of the 
Nile sediment obtained by many scores of borings, made 
across the valley ; the rate at which old Sanscrit books 
inform us of the settlement of the valley of the Ganges, 
and the filling up of the marsh lands of Bengal ; — all these 
and many more are fragmentary shreds of a scale of years, 
which we hope some day to put together, so that we can 
read and use it to determine the length of time between 
the close of the tertiary era and the present day ; between 
the close of the tertiary era and the glacial drift ; or if 
nothing more, the date of the glacial epoch itself, previous 
to which it seems that man existed on the earth. f 

* Here would come in the whole subject of terrace formations, much too 
extensive a theme to be meddled with in a lecture. See, for example, 
those of Quain Clubbe, in Lyell's Antiquity of Man, p. 240. See also J. 
E. Campbell's Erost and Fire, i. p. 357. Lond. 1845. Lyell's Principles, 
xxx. ch. Chambers made the Quain Clubbe terraces respectively, 56, 65, 
and 155 above the sea ; but at Trondjim there is one 522 feet above sea- 
level. According to Celsius and the ancient geographers, Scandinavia 
was an island after the time of Pliny and before the 9th century. (Lyell, 
p. 52.) 

f But Lyell seems to assert the contrary, w 7 hen he says (Antiq. Man, 
p. 241), ' This period [of continental ice], probably anterior to the earliest 
traces yet brought to light of the human race, may have coincided with 
the submergence of England. 5 ' And the accumulation of the boulder-clay 
of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Bedfordshire ' (p. 218). On the other hand, it is 
very evident from Heer's account of the Utznach (Zurich) peat-coal 
beds (in his ITrwelt der Schweiz) occurring, as they do, between two 
boulder-clay formations, that there were two separate glacial periods with 
a modern climate period intervening. So too the Sahara seems, by 
Desor's account of Mares's discoveries of fresh-water shells (planorbis) 
92 m - down the artesian wells, to have been twice submerged, to correspond 
with the two glacial eras. Desor shows by the New Zealand glaciers, 
&c, the improbability of any universal glacial era. 



HI.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 65 

In conclusion, I will adduce one more such fragment. 
It is not only a remarkable example of the method to be 
used, but to show you how well based* our hopes must be. 
It is, in fact, the latest, the finest, and if it were proved 
genuine, an absolutely perfect demonstration of the great 
antiquity of man. It is not in any of the books ; I trust 
that M. Agassiz on his return from South America will be 
able to set before us its full value. I obtain it through my 
friend, Dr Henderson, of the United States navy, himself 
an experienced geologist. But the actual observer of the 
fact was a Naturalist of Rio Janeiro, Dr Ildefonso, formerly 
well known to the scientific world. 

Dr Ildefonso, with his amiable daughters, had been 
amusing themselves for a number of years before Dr H.'s 
visit, in exploring the stalagmite caves which are scattered 
over a considerable region around the harbour of Rio. 
He had obtained a multitude of fossils from a bone-clay 
beneath the stalagmite floor, similar to that which charac- 
terizes the ossuary caves of Europe. Among these fossils 
I understand that he had found the vestiges of man. But 
the important point lies here. The stalagmite deposit 
over the bone-mud is not an amorphous and irregular 
plate, as it necessarily must be, in climates like ours, where 
rain falls at all seasons of the year, and the dripping of 
carbonated waters from the roof must needs be, therefore, 
continual. The climate of the tropics is humid only half 
the year and dry the rest. Consequently the alabaster of 
Brazilian caves shows annual laminae of growth, analogous 
to the ring- growth in trees. Now Dr Ildefonso asserted 
that he and his daughters had repeatedly counted these 
annual layers and found them number as high as twenty 
thousand. 

I leave you to draw the inference. Agassiz estimates 
the age of some fragments of a human skeleton, which 
Count Pourtalis found embedded in a coral reef in Florida, 
at 10,000 years.* Dr Dowler estimates the age of a 
human skeleton found beneath the fourth cypress forest at 
New Orleans at 50,000 years. f The borings of Linant 

* The southern half of the peninsula is post-tertiary, and Agassiz 
says 135,000 years were needful for its formation. See Nott and 
Gliddon, p. 52. 

f Types of Mankind, p. 352. 

5 



66 THE GEOLOGICAL [LECT. 

Bey brought up works of Egyptian art from a depth of 72 
feet, which M. Rosiere estimates at 30,000 years. If 
GirarcPs estimate of the growth of the Nile mud be con- 
sidered more correct, the burnt bricks found to the depth 
of 60 feet below the surface in the borings of Hake Kyan 
Bey must have been 14,000 years old. Yet these are mere 
modern alluvions compared with the diluvium of Abbe- 
ville. And this again can bear no comparison in antiquity 
with the least ancient of the true tertiary strata. My own 
belief is but the reflection of the growing sentiment of 
the whole geological world — a conviction strengthening 
every day, as you may with little trouble see for your- 
selves by glancing through the magazines of current 
scientific literature — that our race has been upon the earth 
for hundreds of thousands of years. 

In what condition I will endeavour to suggest in the 
next lecture. 

But as I have given a general scheme of formations on 
page 62, and as I have referred repeatedly to the fossil 
species with which the remains of man are found in the 
ossuary cave mud and the diluvium, I shall add here the 
latest classification of the subdivisions of the human epoch, 
based on contemporary animal remains, and given by Prof. 
E. E-enevier, of Lausanne, in a note supplementary to the 
posthumous work of M. Troyon, entitled L'homme fossile, 
and published in July of 1867. 

M. Lartet distinguishes four ages of mankind : — 1. the 
age of the great cave bear; 2. of the elephant and rhino- 
ceros ; 3. of the reindeer ; 4. of the aurochs. 

M. Troyon, following M. d'Archiac, describes in his 
chapter of the four epochs of the age of Stone : — 1. the 
epoch of the great bear; 2. the epoch of the mammoth; 
3. the epoch of the reindeer; 4. the epoch of the Urus. 

M. Renevier's scheme is as follows : — 

I. Epoch Ante-glacial, in which man was contemporary 
with the Elephas antiquus, Rhinoceros hemitoechus, and 
Ursus spelceus. During this period man has not been 
proved to exist in the Alpine regions of Europe. 

II. Epoch Glacial, during which man was contemporary 
with the Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorldnus, Ursus 
spelceus, &c. Switzerland desert and covered with glaciers, 
to the exclusion of man. 



ITI.] ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 67 

III. Epoch Post-glacial, during which, man, contempo- 
rary of the Elephas primigenius and Gervus tarandus, had 
approached the Alpine countries as near as Schussenried 
in Wurtemberg. 

IV. Epoch Actual, during which man had penetrated 
Switzerland, with the Gervus elaphus, Bos primigenius, &c, 
and begun to construct plank villages, on piles, in lakes, 
which had the same water-level as at present. 



68 



LECTURE IV. 

ON THE DIGNITY OP MANKIND. 

Man walks enveloped in the mystery of his own exist- 
ence. How lie exists he knows not. Why he exists he 
can only conjecture. "What he is, is the last question ever 
answered to his satisfaction, by Grod, by nature, or by his 
own heart. All philosophies have been poor inventions to 
manufacture weak replies to it. To-night we stand as 
helplessly aghast at our creation as if no generations had 
preceded us. We look into each others' faces and wonder 
how it comes that we are formed erect, intelligent ; while 
things around us creep, or swim, or fly, speechless and 
servile. 

Out of this wonderment has sprung the science of Com- 
parative Zoology. Anxious to know ourselves, we turn 
from side to side to examine curiously the living' creatures 
in the world about us. Perhaps comparison with them 
will teach us something. 

Among the endowments of our human nature must be 
numbered a keen sense of its own dignity. It is possible 
that animals may enjoy and be benefited by a like con- 
sciousness. Some of their actions intimate as much. You 
remember the fable of the Artist and the Lion. 

The artist showed the lion his last picture, a lion slain 
by a man who stood in a conquering attitude o^er him. 
' It is a very fine painting/ remarked the lion; c that is, 
considering that the painter was a man ; but if we lions 
were artists we should manage the subject more agreeably 
to the truth and fitness of things ; the posture of the two 
principal figures would be reversed.-' 

In ancient times apologue and allegory was the favourite 



ON THE DIGNITY OF MANKIND. 69 

form of uttered wisdom. Euclid and iEsop ruled the 
world of intellect together ; and were as truly the masters 
of the masters of the portico and the grove as the child is 
father to the man. The fable is a key to the transition of 
man from a state of barbarism to a state of civilization. 
It marks the joining line where the quick observant fancy 
meets the reflecting intellect. The vivacity of nature is 
not yet lost ; the majesty of knowledge is not yet quite 
assumed. The poet, the philosopher has been born, but 
the funicidum uteris is not yet cut. The fable is a constant 
quantity in the Development Theory ; and rules as mightily 
to-day among the Red Indians of America, and among 
the boys of the public schools of Boston, as ever it did in 
the days of Samson and Abimelech. 

Necessity is the mother of that invention which we call 
Natural History. Whatever the exigencies of the savage 
life demand, that, of course, monopolizes all its energies 
of observation. The Indian tribes of our North- West, 
when asked the name of any one of the thousand flowers 
which bloom upon their prairies, answer simply, ( flower.' 
They have but this one name for all of them, for all of 
them are useless. But if you ask these savages the name 
of any of their trees you will receive a score where we have 
only one, for they employ a separate name for every slight 
variety of every species of growing wood ; because their 
very lives depend on knowing which will serve them best. 
Consequently, the names they give describe utilities. It 
is a mistake to suppose that savages have keener senses, 
or superior powers of observation, than the highly- educated 
and more intellectually endowed civilized man. For dis- 
crimination is more the product of systematic language 
than of eyesight. Yet, on certain sides, the sides of life 
and death we may well call them, the unhappy savage 
makes himself amazingly acute. His names for things 
which interest him are a study of precise description. 
But he always seizes his victim by the hair of the head ; 
he calls things only by their initials; therein he differs 
from our naturalist, who must give Christian, middle, and 
surname in full, and loves to add the title and address 
besides. The savage lights up his subject with a flash ; 
in the dark chamber of the pyramid, his living tomb, he 



70 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 

walks by matchlight, not by sunlight. But bis match is a 
magnesium wire ; and for the moment that it lasts, it shines 
forth like the sun itself. 

When the Cherokees first saw the horse bestrode by 
De Soto they were as much amazed as were the soldiers of 
Fabricius when they first beheld the elephants of Pyrrhus. 
But they named it instantly " the animal with a single 
finger-nail/'' Modern science has made no better general- 
ization than this uniungulics. If there be a characteristic 
posture for a frog or lizard, the Algonquin will be sure to 
show it on the bowl of his tobacco-pipe, the Mexican on 
the temple sculptures in honour of his god. Ethnologists 
have made great capital out of this. The oblique eye and 
elevated ear of the Egyptian effigy is one of the archaeo- 
logical puzzles yet unsolved. 

The same instantaneous play of instinct, through the 
observant fancy of the deaf and dumb, sparkles upon the 
whole surface of their poetic nomenclature. They catch 
the slightest peculiarity of each individual for whom they 
need a name, and name him from it by some appropriate, 
imitative, or descriptive gesture : — one from a mole in the 
cheek ; another from his height or dwarfishness ; another 
from always sitting cross-legged ; another from an habitual 
pensiveness. We grade nations in the scale of civilization 
by this propensity. People who are given to gesticulation 
when they talk, the Italians and the French, for instance, 
are set down as imperfectly cultivated nations ; for gesti- 
culation when spontaneous is imitative, the supplement of 
language, making its shortcomings good. The well-bred 
gentleman has a quiet mien, because in his position the 
brain relieves the body of all responsibility ; because 
abstract ideas take the place of concrete examples, not 
only in his solitary hours of thought, but in his intercourse 
with gentlemen. The highest conversation goes on by 
hints, not by descriptions of things. The intercourse of 
low-bred people, and of the savage world of man in every 
age, must ever be the prosy iteration of details. 

The development of the savage faculty of observation 
under the tuition of our modern information makes the 
technical naturalist, the describer of details, the mere 
determiner and namer of species of animate and inanimate 
things. This is the lowest order among men of science, 



17.] OP MANKIND. 71 

constituting a class which represents the savage or prim- 
eval man in the circle of the highest civilization ; a class 
characterized also by two other well-marked traits, common 
to savages — an inordinate jealousy and love for personal 
reputation in details — and a materialism, springing from 
too close and too uninterrupted dealings with flesh and 
blood alone. Even the laws which this class of naturalists 
discover are laws of form, and are soon personified by them 
as the sole deities. 

No student of nature is competent to be ennobled until 
he has begun to reason largely upon his observations, and 
to put his well-bred fancy to its higher trials, with courage, 
hope, and modesty. The genuine man of science is like 
the new spider which they are studying at the Cambridge 
Botanical Gardens. It has two spinnerets. With one it 
spins a coarse, strong, silvery- coloured thread which it uses 
for the radii and stanchions of its web. Then afterwards 
with the other it spins a finer, golden-coloured silk, with 
which it fills-in all the intervals, and so completes the har- 
mony and beauty of its web, establishes unity, and makes 
a net for every kind of flies. We tie our observations 
together with our theories. We strengthen science by dis- 
cussing facts ; but we must reason on them or they bring 
us in no food. And the food we need is not barren facts 
for the understanding, so much as noble fertile ideas for 
the soul. 

An entomologist who neither knows nor cares to know 
the divine effusions of the Christian heart — who speaks 
with contempt of all philosophy — scoffs at the mention of 
the spiritual — hoots metaphysics out of the academy — and 
is even petulant with his brother nomenclators, if they ex- 
press some natural aspirations of the human heart for freer 
space than that afforded by the limits of a memoir on the 
comparative anatomy of Holothuria Sinensis or Spirifer 
semireticulata — such a naturalist (and there are plenty of 
them) is as ridiculous to the eye of science as is the clergy- 
man who not only does not know, but does not want to 
know, the normal number of legs in the, fly that buzzes 
about his sermon, or in the sedate old lady spider that 
spins in the corner of his ceiling. 

In nothing is the narrowing tendency of mere termino- 
logical natural science more clearly seen in our day than in 



72 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 

the copious and often heated discussions to which the 
Development Theory, as applied to man, has given rise. 
At the risk of being accounted either prosy or else unin- 
telligible,, I must endeavour to give some account of this 
theory, which, whether right or wrong, is too important to 
be overlooked, too noble to be despised, too nearly related 
to the truth to be treated by friend or foe with anything 
but the highest respect. It is, in fact, a supplement to the 
! Nebular Hypothesis. What that proposed to do for the 
worlds in space, the solar system, our earth and its whole 
inorganic constitution, this purposes to do for the organic 
kingdoms, taking the subject of creation up where its 
first chapter ends — where life begins. Together, the two 
theories form one tremendous whole, one scheme of 
thought, the highest reaching after transcendental truth 
which the intellect of man has ever made. 

The subject has been regarded from three points of view. 
Three questions may be asked respecting the. plan of 
creation. One is a German question ; one is a French 
question ; one is an English question. Let them come in 
that order. 

Hegel, the master of modern German philosophy, until 
recently — and to a greater or less extent all the rest of the 
German metaphysicians — consider matter a mere pheno- 
menon of mind. They believe, as Bishop Berkeley 
taught, that all thiugs are ideas. They ask : What Plan 
had the creative intellect within itself ? What was the 
primeval order of the Creator's thoughts ? They say : If 
we can discover that, we need ask no more, for what we 
look at is not real ; things are not what they seem ; 
creation is the dream, the reverie, the phantasia of the 
Infinite Intelligence. 

Opposed to this transcendental school stands the po- 
sitivism of Comte and his numerous followers, perfectly 
characteristic of French thought, French life, French 
taste, French science. According to this, we know what 
we know because it is knowable fact, because the visible 
universe is a great reality, because its actions towards us 
are genuine and complete instruction. But of God and 
his intelligence we know nothing. The plan of creation 
is a catalogue of the actual sequences and consequences in 
nature. 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 73 

In England, that clear, wise, gentle writer of our day, 
Herbert Spencer, is just now busy resuming all that a third 
class of. thinkers have been saying, in what may be called, 
with some propriety, an eclectic system ; somewhat uncer- 
tain, as all eclectics must be ; but eminently practical, as 
all Englishmen must also be. On the one hand, they deny 
that we can learn the secrets of the Divine Will ; on the 
other hand, they deny that we can prove the truth of facts 
as everlasting facts. They prefer to say that we can only 
see with the eyes given us, and reason with the logic of a 
man. They demand only what is that best mode of organ- 
izing our observations in a reasonable manner, so as to 
produce the most harmonious and satisfying system of 
nature, as it seems to us ; leaving the questions of reality, 
certainty, divine intention, and all that, entirely out of 
mind for the present. 

You will not be displeased if I decline to enter more 
deeply into explanations or discussions of these various 
philosophic stand-points, in a lecture devoted to a special 
subject. It would be easy to point out the numerous absurd- 
ities and inconsistencies which the uncommitted thinker 
cannot be blind to in their advocates, even while he finds 
himself bending more favourably to one than to another, 
according to the constitution of his mind and the subject 
nature of his studies. Yet it is by the counterblasts of 
these three great winds of doctrine that the waves have 
been tossed so high about the double question of the 
Nebular Hypothesis and Development Theory. The grand 
debate is, on the one hand, whether God had any forth- 
going, consistent, consecutive, advancing, and developing 
plan in his own mind before he created the universe ; or 
whether he fixed such a law of development in its nature ; 
or, on the other hand, whether all such supposed plans are 
merely in man's eye ; the useful but vain endeavour of us 
intelligent spectators to grasp the details of this divine in- 
vention in some systematic mode, to avoid confusing our 
own intelligence. If there be no plan except such as each 
man can feign unto himself, science has nothing to do with 
it. But if there be one, then science cannot rest until it 
be made out precisely, completely. If it be in nature, 
nature will show it by her works, or rather by her growth. 
If it be in God, God will declare it, seriatim, by miracle or 






74 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

otherwise. ■ If it be in both, man cannot fail to learn it 
sooner or later ; even if its most perfect comprehension be 
reserved for higher intelligences. 

Yon will say that this is all words ! words ! I grant it. 
And yet this represents the first stage of the controversy ; 
and makes those who offer ' divine plans ' for considera- 
tion the enemies of those who deny all possibility of a 
divine plan ontside of the hnman mind. The hostility of 
supporters of different divine plans towards each other has 
a different foundation. One school accuses the other of 
excluding God from nature ; of refusing the Creator access 
to his own creation. The other school retorts that it is 
superstition, not reverence, to require the painful, toil- 
some, endless supervision and revision of the Deity, if his 
work be perfectly constructed at the outset, and full of 
living, moving, renovating, growing forces, like a tree or 
human brain. Between these combatants who can me- 
diate ? None but Deity itself. Science has no argument 
paramount to close the lists or proclaim the victor. Science 
is the study of phenomena, not of essences ; the measurer, 
not the explainer of forces ; the observer, not the com- 
prehender of the laws of nature. 

But even when we abandon, as we must, all transcend- 
ental considerations, and confine the subject strictly within 
the pale of science, we still hear vehement debating. If 
we ask men 'of science whether, when they examine the 
universe, the world we live in, the life of the planet, they 
discover traces of confusion and disorder, they answer 
unanimously, No ! Everything works according to fixed 
laws now ; everything seems to have come into being in an 
orderly manner through all past ages. 

But if we ask them what particular order, or plan, or 
system can be made out according to which the progress 
of events can be classified, they begin at once to contra- 
dict each other. 

Remember that I am only speaking of the world of life, 
of the organic forms of living beings. Setting aside 
minor differences of view among botanists and zoologists, 
I will designate three principal divergent theories of the 
development of life upon the planet, based all of them upon 
that record which is written in the rocks, and which you 
will find imperfectly described in the best and latest works 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 75 

on geology. All agree, 1. That there is an evident progress 
in the appearance of higher and higher forms upon the 
planet, through the geological ages. All agree, 2. That 
the exact epoch of the appearance of this or that form can- 
not be made certain; first, because the record in the rocks 
is itself not complete ; and, secondly, because our examin- 
ation of the record is still less complete. New discoveries 
every day teach us to be careful how we dogmatize about 
one shell having been created before another, or about the 
absolute non-existence of any bird during the previous 
reptilian era, &c. All agree, 3. That a multitude of inter- 
mediate or synthetic types (as they are now called) will be 
discovered, making the series more complete, filling up 
gaps between widely different kinds or genera, to say 
nothing of species, of animals and plants. There have 
lately been found, for instance, fossil horses with deer's 
feet, mammoths with the marsupial pouch, a lizard with 
feathered wings and tail, showing how little prepared we 
are yet to establish our schedule of organic forms. 

But all agree, nevertheless, 4. That taking what has been 
discovered altogether, there is a marked order in point of 
time, not to be mistaken. The most numerous fossils in 
the earliest rocks are corals, sea- weeds, bivalve shells, and 
such low forms of animated nature. In the formations 
over those we find land plants and fishes of low forms in 
vast abundance. In still higher rocks we first find multi- 
tudes of reptiles, and cephalopods among the shells. Still 
later comes the age of birds ; later still that of the mam- 
mals and deciduous trees ; last of all, as a characteristic 
feature, man. 

All agree, however, 5. That this order of events is 
general, not special ; and only appears on a grand sketch, 
from which a multitude of inconsistent or confusing or 
doubtful details are left out. 

Still all agree, 6. To accept this general system of devel- 
opment as a rude, rough whole ; a kind of blocking out 
the statue ; and that it must mean something. 

But now for what it means. Now they begin to disagree, 
coming to particulars. 

The first debate arises over the question of the solidarity 
of the system. One party contending that there is no 
breah in it. The other party takes exactly the opposite 



76 ON THE DIGNITY 



[lect. 



ground, contending that there can be no real connection in 
it ; that the breaks in the line are infinite ; that they are 
patent to every eye, and form, in fact, the very basis of the 
science of geology. Mr Agassiz has gone so far as to as- 
sert that two fossils, although exactly similar to the human 
eye, cannot be of the same species if they are found in 
different formations, however near ; and he has applied 
the same canon to the subject of different localities in one 
age, affirming that two shells, although to all appearance 
of the same species, cannot be in reality the same if found 
on both sides of the Atlantic* On the other hand, Mr 
Darwin, following up the arguments of Lord Monboddo, 
M. Lamarck, and Mr Chambers, and followed in his turn 
by Grey, and Huxley, and other first-class botanists and 
zoologists, — Mr Darwin has astonished the world with the 
opinion, that there can be no radical disconnection between 
any two living beings ; and that all geological gaps would 
be filled up and bridged over with intermediate forms, if 
our search after them were but sufficiently shrewd and pro- 
tracted. He asserts, in fact, that nature started with the idea 
of simple cell-life, which gradually increased, combined, im- 
proved, and perfected itself through an infinity of forms of 
plant and animal, until we see all things as they stand and 
move to-day. Monboddo and Lamarck, indeed, gave fan- 
ciful accounts of this extensive and mysterious process ; 
applying their theories chiefly to the case of man, to ex- 
plain why he had left the trees or the shore, and how he 
had lost his tail. To the great naturalist of the Pacific 
Ocean belongs the honour of organizing in a reasonable 
manner this side of the question. It has therefore come 
to be known by the name of the Darwinian hypothesis as 
well as by any other. I must refer you to his own descrip- 
tion of that theory of ' Natural Selection/ by which he 
tries to account for the transition steps along the line of 
change, and to explain the sudden and frequent breaks 
which are apparent in its course. It is a great thought, 
and deserves the honours heaped upon it. And all allow 
that it is true if kept within the regions of variety. But 
whether it be true for actual specific differences, and there- 
fore for changes of genus, family, or class, there are vehe- 

* Mr Conrad, who not two years ago opposed this view as extravagant, 
now seems inclined to acquiesce in it as probably correct. 



IY.] OP MANKIND. 77 

ment disputings. And I can see no mode of settlingthem, 
if we cannot take nature in the very act of exchanging one 
species for another, or converting one species into another. 

The second subject of debate respects the unity of the 
system. Is there but one series; or are there several 
parallel series of organic forms ? 

The Immortal Cuvier established the grand quaternion 
of types which all modern comparative zoology virtually 
accepts. He divided the animal world into Badiata, or 
creatures constructed as if branching out from a centre 
in several directions, like star-fish, — Articulata, creatures 
constructed by addition lengthwise, like the worms, — Mol- 
lusca, creatures with two parts symmetrically fitting along 
a vertical line, like the clam, — Vertebrata, creatures with a 
backbone, or, as Agassiz would have it, with two parts 
unsymmetrically fitting along a horizontal line. 

The question then comes up, whether between these 
four plans on which all animals are made, there can be 
discovered any logical distinction as to worth or dignity. 
The radiates, it is true, are all low creatures. But among 
the articulates we find the b>ee ; and among the molluscs 
the cuttlefish, both of them creatures of high breeding and 
intelligence. The great development of brain, indeed, be- 
longs exclusively to the vertebrates; but so far as we 
can see, there was yet no inherent impossibility in the at- 
tachment of such a brain to any radiated or annulated body. | 
In fact, the backbone of a vertebrate is itself an annulated 
system, giving off nervous branches from a series of gangli- 
onic nodes. It is argued then with some plausibility, that 
these four capital types of animal creation have no com- 
parative dignity in themselves ; and that that is an idio- 
syncrasy of man. They are each and all perfectly and 
beautifully adapted to their circumstances, — the mollusca 
to the waters, the articulata to the air, the vertebrata to 
the land, and the radiates to the planes and lines where 
air and land and water meet. It ought not, therefore, to 
be expected that one or other of them should take pre- 
cedency in the creation, either in respect to government 
or in respect to seniority. In other words, the earliest 
dawn of life should show us at the same time molluscs 
inhabiting the sea, insects in the air, vertebrates on land, 
^and radiates where land and water meet. 



78 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 

Now how stand the facts ? In the Potsdam sandstone, 
the rock at the base of the Lower Silurian system, and the 
oldest rock in which fossils have been found in both variety 
and abundance, there are multitudes of corals and seaweed, 
multitudes of worms and trilobites, multitudes of bivalves 
and univalves, and the foot-prints, at least, of vertebrate 
animals, which make the representation of all the four 
kingdoms complete. 

If there has been a Darwinian development of animal life 
upon the planet, then it looks as if it had been carried out 
along four lines rather than one. Four stand-points of creat- 
ive energy must have been assumed ; four startings out of 
life must be accounted for ; four mysteries, four miracles, 
four beginnings of creation, to be developed instead of one ! 
But where all is mystery and miracle additions are hardly 
noticeable. It becomes Mr Darwin's business, then, not only 
to suggest some plausibly rational mode by which one spe- 
cies could gradually or suddenly pass the short interval 
which separates it from another ; his explanation must suf- 
fice to bridge the awful chasms which have always kept 
these four great plans of structure separate, along the lines 
' of their development. He must show us how an animal of 
radial growth could be developed into one of linear growth. 
Nay, he must fill up the immense interval between the 
plant* and the animal; and, finally, the chasm between the 
atom of carbon or hydrogen, and the nucleated cell of albu- 
men or fibrin. He must explain the genius of life itself before 
he can make his law of natural selection stand for anything 
more than a beautifully-worded description of the ills that 
all flesh falls heir to when it is born upon this planet. How 
it is born upon the planet is another matter, and remains 
unexplained by his hypothesis. We do not get rid of mira- 
cles by chasing them back along the ages to the starting- 
point, and concentrating them there. A line of battle is 
not necessarily vanquished and annihilated when it is rolled 
-up by an attack upon one flank, when there is a reserved 
force at the other end. 

You see, this train of argument attacks not so much the 

special statements of the Darwinian hypothesis, as its very 

foundations. It says to Mr Darwin, My dear sir, you have 

[ four times as much to do as you thought you had. You 

must not only explain how a man came from a monkey, 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 79 

and a monkey from a squirrel, and a squirrel from. a bat, 
and a bat from a bird, and a bird from a lizard, and a lizard 
from a fish ; but you must suggest some possible means of 
transforming a vertebrate fish out of a shell fish, or out of 
a jelly fish, or out of a lobworm or trilobite ; then you must 
go on to show us how the first trilobite, or the first coral 
animal, or the first rhizopod was obtained by your process 
of natural selection out of still earlier vegetable species. 
Nay, you cannot even stop there. You must explain the 
very first appearance of living tissue out of the inorganic 
elements of dead matter. The world is not a unit ; it is 
like the magic ivory balls of the Chinese shops, globes 
within globes, worlds within worlds — all visible through 
the holes in each other's peripheries. 

Now what is the Darwinian answer to this objection, de- 
rived from Cuvier' s four-fold classification of the animal 
kingdom ? This : — Cuvier may not have made an abso- 
lutely perfect classification. There may be intermediate 
forms, which we cannot yet be certain where to place; 
which, when discovered, will fall as naturally under one 
plan as under another. We are not yet quite sure that 
there are just four distinct and sharply defined lines of 
living type-form; we are not sure that nature lays out her 
work in lines at all. She is not as linear, at all events, as 
our literality would have her be. 

There is a just tendency in the new schools to establish 
rather a circular classification. The great disciple of Cuvier, 
whom you have had the good fortune to attach to your 
own city and university, and whose impulse all American 
science has been feeling now for twenty years, has elucidated 
the four types of animal life and their common appearance 
at the beginning, in lectures which he has delivered in this 
room. I have not the courage even to saunter through 
the meadows which he owns. I refer you to his own 
masterly arguments. He is a vehement an ti- Darwinian. 
But even agaiust this master of the subject I must warn 
you. He has great opponents. And the most recent dis 
coveries are also against him. There have lately been dis- 
covered infinitely older fossils than those I just now al- 
luded to in the Potsdam sandstone. I hold in my hand a 
specimen of the oldest fossil in the world ; and lo, it is a 
rhizopod, a creature belonging to the very lowest forms of 



80 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

life. It is true these lowest forms are peculiarly fitted for 
preservation in the fossil state ; others of higher form may 
have co-existed with them and been destroyed. But when 
we see these lowest of all known forms standing alone at 
the very beginning of time, and man, the highest and 
noblest form, appearing at the end, and an unmistakable 
gradation, always upward, through the long ages, and 
along all the four lines of plan — what open mind can help 
imbibing, if not the Darwinian doctrine, at least the spirit 
of the Theory of Development ? 

But this leads me to the third head of the discussion : 
the always upward direction of the development of life- 
forms. This also has not been left unquestioned. One of 
the most popular and powerful thinkers that geology ever 
owned was the lamented Hugh Miller. Large-minded 
and erudite, trained by patient, personal investigation in 
the field, with a great brain, and a great love of truth, he 
was also a religious enthusiast, bigotedly orthodox in the 
sense of Geneva. His views therefore as a speculative 
geologist were peculiar, but none the less worthy of con- 
sideration, for they insisted upon the introduction of such 
exceptional phenomena as the advocates of the Develop- 
ment Theory were too much inclined to ignore. He op- 
posed the theory ; and upon the ground that it was not 
complete ; that not only were there breaks in the series of 
life-forms which could not be got over, but actual reversals 
of direction. He argued for a law of development actually 
downwards, or backwards, as well as for a law of develop- 
ment forwards and upwards. It is true that he made the 
law of degeneracy subordinate; but he still insisted that 
it was not exceptional, but universal, and included in the 
other. His notion was, that life advanced, not in an ob- 
liquely rising straight line, but in a succession of higher and 
higher parabolic curves. Each type as a whole he allowed 
to be nobler than the type preceding it, but not in every 
part, or throughout its whole career. He preferred to 
imagine each type beginning below the maximum dignity 
of the type preceding it; then rising forward to a maximum 
dignity superior to that of the type preceding it; then 
falling away, degenerating and decaying to extinction. 
He instanced our varieties of fruits, and the rise and decay 
of families of men, as examples of this law, subject to 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 8l 

inspection in our day. Including size and number 'among 
the elements of dignity he showed how the fossil Irish elk 
excelled in size and strength any now-existing ruminant ; 
how the cave-bear, the aurochs, the mammoth, the Siva- 
lensian turtle, the dinodon, each and all excelled the bears 
and oxen, elephants, turtles, and kangaroos of the present 
day ; how the mosses of the coal-measures were as large 
as our trees; the frogs of the middle secondary age as 
large as modern elepFants. Each age, said he, has been 
indeed an advance upon the previous age, and has brought 
forth new illustrations and finer ones of the Creator's 
skill. But each age has had its own superior glories, not 
to be dimmed by any exhibitions of a later date. Each 
type has been quite perfect in itself, was made entirely 
suitable for the time and place of its creation ; rose up to 
power ; took full possession of its whole inheritance ; grew 
to its utmost size ; completely did its work ; but when its 
time was past fell off and withered ; grew small and weak, 
and, perished, to give place to the next type, ordained to 
a like destiny. The appearance of man upon the earth, 
clad in beauty, armed with dominion, but after a time of 
glory, falling from his first estate, and becoming savage 
and degenerate, seemed to his eyes a natural illustration 
of this law. And in like manner he would explain the 
coming of Christ at the end of the old dispensation ; and 
the rise of the Christian Church followed by its decay. In 
the same spirit he anticipated a millennium, and the appear- 
ance of angelic men, perhaps to fall in tarn, like Lucifer 
and all his angels. 

Geologists read Hugh Miller's book with as much de- 
light as do other people. But they do not accept his 
Theory of Development ; the facts on which it was ap- 
parently based, when critically examined, do not sustain 
it. And every geologist must feel that such a theory could 
never have been suggested by a summary of all known 
facts relating to the subject, to any mind not prepossessed 
by a certain set of theological ideas. It was the last 
struggle of orthodoxy against natural science embodied in 
geology. Orthodoxy may well be proud of its advocate, 
and apotheosize his memory; but no cause could be 
won so. 

I would not dare to £0 into a detailed discussion of the 



82 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 

doctrine of development this evening. The literature of 
the subject is already copious, learned, well and clearly- 
argued, and within easy reach of every one who feels 
desirous to arrive at some conclusion. I have only aimed 
at stating the question, and suggesting, that it is an open 
question not only between theologians and geologists, but 
between one class of men of science and another, and that 
it ought to be no bugbear in the path of generous and 
truthful minds. 

The aim of the Creator seems to be to fill out all the 
possible details of his great plan, to realize all possible 
plans, modes, conditions, forms, powers, accidents, and 
relations. The highest artist wears the least mannerism. 
Infinite variety is the clue to the labyrinth of the universe. 
Infinite variety is, in fact, the only law of natural history 
as yet fully and completely established to the satisfaction 
of the mind of the naturalist. It has been made the law 
of every individual life. 

First let us look within. Does not our education pro- 
ceed by alternate synthesis and analysis of perceptions ? 
We collect facts ; we combine and compare them ; we 
perceive their likeness, and discover what we call laws. 
Then we take these synthetic laws, and go to work again, 
seeking new illustrations and confirmations of. them. In- 
stead of that we perceive exceptions and denials. We leara 
to contrast and discover differences; we analyze, or separ- 
ate, or tear to pieces what we had put together and con- 
solidated. We have to do it. We find that bad bricks 
have got into our wall ; inharmonious tints have been 
chosen for our pattern. We build, we weave again, now 
more successfully. Thus we advance ; thus we enrich our 
life, the world, and history. 

Turning our eyes again towards God, do we not see 
Him at the same kind of alternate synthetic and analytic 
creation ? Herbert Spencer calls it the law of Differentia- 
tion ; and shows u^ how the forces of matter first aggre- 
gate and then disintegrate the solid parts of the world, 
condensing the gases, combining the bases, dissolving the 
salts, crystalizing the deposits, tearing down the moun- 
tains, building up the valleys, alternately consolidating and 
dispersing, arranging and disturbing, forming and re- 
forming, until that variety has been produced which char- 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 83 

acterizes the present state of things. He shows how the 
present variety of hnman society has been accomplished 
on the same principles; the endless variety of art, of 
thought. 

But we are only concerned now in seeing how truly the 
law holds good in Natural History proper. Whether we 
suppose one or another classification best, it all comes to 
this in the end : every nook and cranny of the world has 
got itself somehow filled with living forms, all fashioned 
agreeably to the circumstances of the place of their exist- 
ence. As these circumstances vary infinitely, so must the 
living forms.* If there be an apparent advancement and 
ennoblement of living forms through the ages, it must be 
dependent in some reasonable manner upon some slow ad- 
vancing movement in the physics of the globe, with which 
the living forms must stand in amicable harmony. In 
geology, therefore, there must be some explanation for all 
the phenomena of palaeontology. If man did not exist 
until quite recently, we must conclude that the earth was 
not prepared for him till recently. And so of all the other 
and lower creatures. This teaches us the needlessness of 
any transcendental treatment of the development theory ; 
and the wisdom of those who keep the discussion of it 
down to pure Natural History facts. 

One of the most remarkable and important consequences 
of the law of Differentiation bears directly upon the his- 
tory of Man. Differentiation is not only the production of 
variety, but the production of multitude. Both are der 
pendent (but in different ways) upon the bewildering net- 
work of cross acting physical forces, which support and 
also destroy life. If these physical forces actually produce 
living forms, we see at once that they must generate them 
in multitudinous crowds. If they do not, but only sus- 
tain them and destroy them, we see that the Creator was 
under a physical necessity to place in existence great mul- 
titudes of living forms if he desired any of them to con- 
tinue to exist. This is true not only respecting the mul- 

* If there be 90 per cent, of carbonate of lime in the sea, there must 
be a vast over-proportion of infusorial forms to appropriate it, while 
a corresponding; proportion of infusorial life of another kind appropriates 
the remaining 10 per cent, of silica. (See Jukes' Manual, p. 134, 135, f.) 



84 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT, 

titude of individuals, but respecting the multitude of 
varieties or species. 

What do we see, then, when we look around us^ ? First, 
as to the multitude of individuals. There are . supposed, 
indeed, to be a thousand millions of human beings on the 
earth : but this is nothing. There are a thousand millions 
of mosquitoes in a single swamp. Each female fish pro- 
duces a million of young fry per annum. Is this a law of 
life ? Yes ! but it is still more a law of death. The final 
cause of this fecundity must be discovered rather among 
the destroying agencies of nature than among its sustain- 
ing harmonies. We notice, therefore, that those animals 
are most prolific whose individual lives are least secure ; 
and these are what we call the lowest forms of life. We 
call them so because daily wholesale destruction gives us 
the sense of waste, and consequently of worthlessness. 
These are the forms which would exist during the earlier 
and more adventurous days, when quaking lands, and hiss- 
ing seas, and steam-filled skies, made the vexed earth a 
most unnatural mother; quite unsafe to trust her with 
children of a riper nature than corals and sea-weed. 

What is true of the multitudes of individuals is equally 
and for the same reason true of the multitudes of specific 
forms. Each species has a habitat and is fitted to it. The 
development theory supposes the habitat to have fitted up 
its own specific forms. Whether that supposition be true 
or false matters little ; the fact remains unchanged in 
either case that each change of circumstances causes, or 
necessitates, or is accompanied by, some specific differ- 
ence. Now if an animal can only change its nature to 
suit a change in its circumstances it need not perish. 
But this is a high faculty, scarcely exercised by any plant 
or animal excepting man and a few of the mammalia which 
keep about him. Even these exert the power of adapta- 
tion so imperfectly that they are sure to perish in the long 
run when taken from one climate to another ; and man 
himself can only accomplish the immense feat of per- 
manent migration at the risk of individual destruction, and 
by calling to his help the whole physical, intellectual, and 
spiritual worlds to be his body guards. 

Nature grants the right of selecting its own food to 
every creature that consents to remain within the limits of 



IV 1 OP MANKIND. , 85 

its own habitat. There and there only nature has provided 
exactly for the demands of its stomach, and its stomach is 
the wise guardian of the interests of the rest of its consti- 
tution. Liberty is perfect, because the necessary and the 
pleasant can be secured by the mere exercise of will. Mi- 
gration must destroy or at least limit this freedom of the 
will. The animal that invades territory destined to sup- 
port the life of other animals unlike its own, finds poisons 
when it seeks for meat, and must endure the consequences. 
'Tis now a choice of evils. The right to roam and choose 
at its own sweet will is gone. The will is now subjected 
by a judgment rendered anxious and unhappy by self-evi- 
dent want of harmony between its suffering desires and 
nature's strange provisions. To this law all animals must be 
subjected which attach themselves to man. But in the high- 
est degree it is the key to the development of man in history. 
The wider the migration, the greater the embarrassment, 
the keener the suffering ; the more subjected the will, the 
more unfolded the intellect and passions ; for hunger is | 
fierce and cunning, while satiety is unobservant as an oyster 
and gentle as a lamb. 

Thus it happens that every possible slightest shade of 
variation in the conditions of existence must be a trump 
of doom, or else must be provided against in the plan of 
the Creation by some equally subtile variation in the 
organs of life. This is the only explanation for that in- 
credible number of specific forms distinguishable among 
the lowest ranks of animated nature. Think of it ! A 
German entomologist has made out 820 species of insects, 
preserved in the pieces of amber which form his cabinet, 
all of them, mites, gnats, mosquitoes, proboscidians or 
sucking flies, who met their fate by sticking fast in a gum 
which exuded from trees of tertiary age, growing in moist, 
low places sheltered from the wind. Of all these species 
only 30 were such as now belong to the mosquito tribes of 
Europe ; 100 were species which we have at present living 
in America ; but not one out of the whole 820 was like any 
of the numerous species of mosquitoes known in the south 
of Africa. 

Think again of the numberless species of corals belong- 
ing only to one age. Mr Sj^dney S. Lyons' cabinet of 
Devonian and Silurian crinoids at Louisville, in Kentucky, 



86 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 

magnificently furnished as it is with genera and species, 
gives but a faint conception of the multitudes of separate 
beautiful forms which specify the various physical condi- 
tions under which that family of the radiated animals has 
struggled so bravely, but often so unsuccessfully, to con^ 
tinue to exist.* 

But as we approach our own times, and a quieter bosom 
gives suck to worthier embodiments of the wisdom of the 
divine, more self-sustaining, more adaptable to circum- 
stances, more hardy, more migratory, or more inventive, 
we see how these countless multitudes become more moder- 
ate swarms, vast herds become small flocks, flocks turn 
to single pairs. Life has grown safe. A genus need no 
longer put forth its hundred specific forms, like tentacles, 
to cling withal to the tempestuous earth. Instead of one 
bear for the summer and another for the winter, one bear 
will do for both, provided he may hybernate. *« One set of 
birds for north and south will be enough, if you will teach 
them to migrate twice every year. Let man be but a 
single species, yet if you give him a mind to be his own 
tailor, shoemaker, house-carpenter, shipbuilder, farmer, 
and gunsmith, he may inhabit the whole earth from pole 
to pole. This is the great argument for unity of species 
in the case of man ; a subject, however, to be taken up in 
my next lecture. We are speaking now of the dignity of 
man ; and of the likelihood that his numbers will be small 
in inverse proportion to his powers of resistance to those 
fatal forces of surrounding life, beneath the blows of which 
all meaner images of God have been in past times over- 
thrown and utterly destroyed. 

It is this ability of man to protect himself against nature 
that affords us an explanation of the paucity of his remains 
as fossilized. For, in the first place, as I have just ex- 
plained, the race of man has been a scanty race. And, in 
the second place, the individual man has been a cunning 
fellow } always on his guard : foresighted against the ma- 
licious tricks and brutal damages of nature ; wisely sus- 
picious of the quagmires and quicksands in which the 
stupid mammoths were entombed; prompt to devise ex- 

* The promised work of Professor Agassiz will give us another mag- 
nificent example from the basin of the Amazon, where he has discovered; 
hundreds of species of fish in a single lake. 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 87 

pedients for recovery in disaster, and, above all, able to 
form leagues for mutual life insurance. Yet with all bis 
superior advantage, nature was sometimes too much for 
bim. As I narrated in my last lecture, men bave been 
fossilized just like inferior brutes. As tbe eruption of 
Vesuvius in Pliny's days caught a few sleepers and a 
sick man or two, when all the rest of the inhabitants of 
Herculaneum and Pompeii made good their escape ; so in 
an age immensely older than the pyramids, a torrent of 
volcanic mud captured one of the flying aborigines of cen- 
tral France, part of whose skeleton is now in the museum 
of Le Puy. The crater from which the torrent came be- 
longs to a group, the fires of which have been extinct since 
the days when the rhinoceros and lion were at home in 
western Europe, before the glacial epoch. 

The care which men have always taken to secure the bodies 
of their relatives and friends from decay has been the chief 
cause of their utter disappearance from the earth. Eeli- 
gious veneration has produced the same effect in ages when 
dead bodies were burned instead of buried. The supersti- 
tious dread of being devoured by wild beasts after death 
has caused many races to suspend their corpses in baskets 
from the boughs of trees, ensuring speedy dissolution. 
Yet the buried bones of ancient heroes, as we have already 
seen, have been occasionally exhumed by floods and swept 
into caves and buried again in a broad common alabaster 
sarcophagus in the most effectual manner. 

In spite, then, of the paucity of human beings to be fos- 
silized, and in spite of the care which they have always 
taken not to be fossilized, they have not always escaped 
fossilization. But the conditions under which human fos- 
silization became possible were so hard to realize, that every 
case was an exception to that law which has made the strata 
of the earth so many celneteries of the past, so many 
museums for the present. Every new discovery of a fossil 
human bone of ancient date is a sort of natural miracle 
wrought specially for science. 

In studying out man's role in the great drama of the 
Development of Animal Life, we depend greatly upon 
these precious relics of his existence in an older era than 
the present. But in determining man's relative dignity 
in the grand scale of animal life, we have other and abund- 



88 ON THE DIGNITY [LECT. 

ant materials for thought. That scale not only ascends 
through all the ages, but stands to-day before us. The 
earth is still crowded with the representatives of most of 
the departed forms. Details are changed, but Natural 
History continues still the same. Man can be classified by 
what he is, as well as' by what he has been. If we need 
see all that he can be, we need but travel from land to 
land, from city to country, from continent to island, from 
field to forest, from mountain to desert, from the ice-fields 
of Greenland to the jungles of India and the swamps of 
the gulf of Guinea; everywhere some new variety of man 
will offer itself for our examination, — surrounded by as 
various forms of lower life, with which to be compared. 

In spite of all this wealth of opportunity zoologists have 
found it a most difficult task to give an adequate and satis- 
factory definition of the animal called Man. 

i Linnseus led the way in this field of inquiry by compar- 
ing man and the apes in the same manner as he compared 
these last with the Carnivores, Ruminants, Rodents, or 
any other division of warm-blooded quadrupeds. After 
several modifications of his original scheme, he ended by 
placing Man as one of the many genera in his Order 
Primates, which embraced the apes and lemurs, and also 
the bats ; for he found these last to be nearly allied to some 
of the lowest forms of monkeys. But all those modern 
naturalists who retain Linnseus's order Primates, agree to 
exclude the bats (cheiroptera), and most of them class 
Man as one of the families of this order Primates/* 

Blumenbach (following Linnseus in 1779) proposed, on 
the other hand, to separate Man entirely from the Mon- 
keys. He called the latter ' fourhanded ' quadrumana-. 
His definition of Man was short and simple enough : 
animal, erectum, bimanum. Buffon had used the same 
terms in a somewhat different way 13 years before. 
Ouvier used them again 12 years later. He placed the 
apes, monkeys, and lemurs together in one grand order, 
and man in another order by himself. 

In spite of the authority of these four great names, 
modern zoologists have preferred to make man stand alone, 
not indeed as an order, but simply as a family. Professor 

* Lyell, Ant. of Man, ch. xxiv. 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 89 

Huxley * even repudiates the very term quadrumanous. 
He takes the ground that the hind extremities of monkeys, 
apes, and lemurs, bear no true resemblance at all to the 
hand of man. They are in all respects not hands but feet. 
On the other side he affirms that there is no anatomical 
difference of type between the hand of a gorilla and the 
hand of a man. The hand of the gorilla is merely clum- 
sier, heavier, and furnished with a shorter thumb. The 
foot of the gorilla he shows to possess also the three char- 
acteristic features of the human foot : 1. By the same 
arrangement of the tarsal bones ; 2. By the presence of 
the same short flexor muscle and short extensor muscle of 
the digits ; and, 3. By the presence of the same peculiar 
muscle called the peronoeus longus. The only difference 
which can be mentioned is merely formal, viz. that the 
great toe of the gorilla is more movable than man's. In 
fact, there would be, according to this, less difference 
between the extremities of man and the gorilla than 
between those of the gorilla and orang-outang ;f an d yet 
others of the monkey tribe have still more ^widely diver- 
gent extremities. 

In like manner a comparison of the teeth of man with 
those of the apes and monkeys has failed to establish them 
in separate orders. ' The number of teeth in the gorilla 
and in all the Old World monkeys,, except the lemurs, is 
32, the same number as in man. The general pattern of 
the crown of the tooth is also the same. All the American 
apes, however, have 38 teeth. The only real distinction 
between the jaw of the apes and the human jaw consists 
in the fact that the eye-teeth of the apes project almost 
like tusks/ 

If we institute a like comparison as to other portions of 
the frame we are led to the same results. There are 
sometimes remarkable differences between one human race 

* Huxley's third ' Lecture on the motor organs of man compared 
with those of other animals/ It. School of Mines (March, 1861), embo- 
died in his 'Evidence as to man's place in Nature.' Williams and 
Norgate, Loudon, 1804. [In Lyell, Ant. of Man, ch. xxiv.] 

f The thumb of the orang differs by its shortness and absence of any 
special long flexor muscle from that of a gorilla more than it differs from 
that of man. The carpus of the orang and of most of the lower apes 
contains nine bones; that of a chimpanzee, gorilla, and man, only eight. 



90 ON THE DIGNITY. [LECT. 

and another. Two years ago, Dr Broca, the Secretary of 
the Anthropological Society of Paris, was good enough to 
show me nearly 100 human skeletons which he hacl recently 
procured from a cave of the Stone age, discovered by an 
English gentleman, in preparing a park for his new country- 
house, about ten leagues north-east of Paris. Dr Broca 
pointed out to me one striking peculiarity in the anatomy of 
the arm-bones of this ancient race. There was a round 
foramen pierced through the thin curtain of bone which 
connects the two processes at the elbow. He assured me 
that he had examined hundreds of arm-bones obtained from 
cemeteries of the Merovingian age, but none of them ex- 
hibited this hole. Nor is it to be found in the modern 
human skeleton, except among the Hottentots. But it is 
a characteristic mark of the ape and monkey anatomy. 

There is a fourth ground of comparison. If we can 
learn nothing from the hands, the feet, the teeth, the bones, 
cannot we succeed better by comparing the shape and the 
size of the skull with its containing brain ? Professor 
Dana, of New Haven, dissatisfied like the rest with all other 
tests, finds refuge in this. He thinks he has established 
for the whole range of life -development a common law, 
which he names the law of Cephalization. All animal 
forms are worth precisely their weight in brain. Man is 
the noblest creature because in him the digestive and the 
locomotive systems become at last subordinate to the per- 
ceptive and the reasoning faculties. I cannot give you the 
details of his ingenious reasoning. The tendency of zoology 
has for a long time been to this conclusion. But even 
here there appears no distinction of kind but only of 
degree. 

Owen, in 1857, unable, as he says, to appreciate or con- 
ceive of the distinction between the psychical phenomena 
of a chimpanzee and of a Boschisman, or of an Aztec with 
arrested brain-growth, proclaimed his return to Blumen- 
bach's and Cuvier's old classification, making man a 
separate sub-class, based upon three cerebral characters. 
Owen's assertion was that man differs from the three 
mammalian classes, represented by the ape, the beaver, 
and the kangaroo, — 1. in the overlapping of his cerebral 
hemispheres forward so as to cover the olfactory lobes, and 
backward so as to cover and quite conceal the cerebellum, 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 91 

when looked down upon from above ; 2. In the presence 
of what is called the ' posterior horn of the lateral ven- 
tricle ; ' and, 3. In the addition to the hind lobe of each 
hemisphere of what is called the 'hippocampus minor.'* 

Upon the publication of this theory a storm arose. It 
was shown that Owen's picture of the brain of a chimpanzee, 
which he took from a Dutch work, printed in 1849, and on 
which he based his comparison, was worthless, because it 
had been drawn from a shrunk specimen. M. Gratiolet, 
( the highest authority in cerebral anatomy of our age,' 
showed by new drawingsf from fresh specimens, that no 
such distinctions between the brain forms of man and the 
chimpanzee could at all be made out. The human brain 
which he dissected was that of a Bushwoman exhibited in 
London. He showed that the human and the simian 
brains, however convoluted in man, however smooth in the 
marmoset, instead of having Owen's distinctions, have four 
grand characters in common : 1. a rudimentary olfactory 
lobe; 2. A posterior lobe, not uncovering, but completely 
covering the cerebellum ; 3. A well-defined ( fissure of 
Silvius ; ' and, 4. A posterior horn in the lateral ventricle. 

To settle the dispute which, upon this, broke out afresh 
fifteen genera of Old World and New World apes and 
monkeys, dying in the Zoological Gardens of London, 
were dissected ; representing almost all the forms in dis- 
pute, from that of the chimpanzee, the next to man, to 
that of the lemur, farthest removed from man. The con- 
clusion arrived at from these and from other Continental 
examinations which were made at the same time, was, that 
Owen's distinctions had no foundation in point of fact. J 

Nothing remains but the superior volume of the human 
brain, 1. Absolutely, i. e. when compared with the volume 
of the ape's brain ; and, 2. Eelatively, i. e. when we com- 
pare the brain of a man with the bulk and weight of his 
body ; and the brain of an ape with the bulk and weight of 
its body. 

Now Professor Huxley says that, so far as he is aware, 

t * Owen, Proc. Linn. Soc. Lond., vol. viii. p. 20. Archencephala was 
his new sub-class name. (Lyell, Ant. Man, xxiv. p. 481.) 

f The false and true drawings are placed opposite each other in 
Lyell, pp. 482, 483. 

X See Rolliston's summary on p. 489 of Lyell. 



92 ON THE DIGNITY [lECT. 

no human adult cranium contains less than 62 cubic inches, 
and that the most capacious gorilla skull measured no more 
than 34 \ ; a difference between them of say two- to one — a 
tremendous difference ! The difference between the small- 
est human skull measured by Morton, viz. 63 cubic inches, 
and the largest human skull, which measured 114, is also 
something tremendous — nearly two to one. If volume of 
brain, then, be the criterion, the mathematical statement 
of man's relation to the ape will be expressed by the series 

114 : 63 : 34J. 
But the series will not be complete until we add the size 
of the smallest gorilla adult skull yet measured, which was 
24 cubic inches. It is, you see, a descending series, and 
nothing more — 114 : 63 : 34 J : 24. We may add, however, 
still lower figures, and keep very nearly the same propor- 
tions, from among the crania of the lower orders of apes. 

Language is no criterion, for every animal has a language 
of its own. The sense of the ridiculous is possessed by 
brutes, who laugh with their eyes, or tail, if not with their 
whole face, as man does. The faculty of worship in itself 
is no distinction ; for the devotion of a dog to his master, 
of a lover to his mistress, of a Christian to his Saviour, of 
an angel to his God, has the same essential root so far as 
we can see. Susceptibility to improvement is not peculiar 
to man ; nor the natural law by which there occurs an he- 
reditary accumulation of acquired powers. This also, and 
all the before-mentioned criteria are only available for a 
difference in degree, but not for a difference in kind, distin- 
guishing man above the rest of the creation. 

When we notice the intelligence of the dog, and the ele- 
phant, whose type of brain is more remote from man, and 
see how they manifest the possession of the moral faculties, 
displaying, as they do, the sense of shame, of justice, of 
loyalty, of compassion, we find out how little distance our 
reasoning can go ; how imperfect are our data, how myste- 
rious are the functions of all brain matter, how temperate 
we ought to be in entertaining convictions in regard to the 
relationship of man to other animals, how sound and high 
our hope of self-improvement should become, and what 
grandeur resides in the Apostle's words — ' forgetting the 
things that are behind, and pressing forward to those that 
are before.'' 



IV.] OF MANKIND. 93 

Here, as in so many other similar cases, science- is en- 
tirely at fault,— Bass elas sitting at the foot of the wall 
that surrounds his happy valley. I think I can see 
around me in society sufficient evidences that man is a de- 
veloped monkey. But what of that ? Shall a wise man 
kill himself for shame because his ancestor, ten generations 
back removed, was hung for felony ? What does it con- 
cern us that our naked and painted forefathers danced their 
devilish orgies round shrieking victims, set on fire in towers 
of wicker-work, making night hideous, and the angels hide 
their faces in pity, horror, and disgust ! I confess, for my 
own part, aside from all considerations of actual science, I 
like to see every tub stand upon its own bottom. This 
pride of civilization seems to me the pride of parvenus. 
If mankind were originally apes, they have, at all events, 
acquired the right to be so no longer. The ape-like skull 
of the Stone age has been replaced by the skull of the poet, 
the philosopher, and the statesman. Let us be satisfied ; 
Christ has come. I only wish that I could present before 
your eyes, as a worthy close to our train of thought to-night, 
a picture of some aboriginal savage of the Stone age, and 
then, in divine contrast to its humiliating ugliness and base 
brutality, a copy of that immortal statue of the highest 
type of man, the Christ of Dannecker. I see you love, 
like the old Greeks, to adorn your city, and honour your 
great men with statues : why have you not indulged your- 
selves in the joy of having always before your eyes the 
wonder of the age — the greatest statue of the greatest 
Being of all ages ? St Petersburg has obtained a copy of 
it in marble. Why should Boston be behind St Peters- 
burg ? It is worth an annual pilgrimage to Stuttgard to 
behold it. Such majesty ! such tenderness ! such intellect 
and wisdom in the brow and face ! Such grace and beauty 
in the form, seen through the flowing robe ! Of more than 
mortal size, it seems no more than man, — no less than all 
the blessed gospels say of him ! the flower of the long de- 
velopment ! the very incarnation of the Deity. 



94 



LECTURE V. 

ON THE UNITY OF MANKIND, 

"We are now to consider what light the modern sciences 
can throw upon the question of the oneness or the many- 
ness of mankind. 

It has been common to use with great looseness of 
meaning the terms race, family, species, in their applica- 
tion to mankind. 

The c race of man' is contrasted with the animal races, 
and the race of angels, — the word race being the English 
form of the Latin word radix, root, and implying a common 
origin to all the human inhabitants of this planet. 

The ' human species ' is an expression even more common 
in late literature than the l human race/ but quite as in- 
definite. The word species in Latin (specto, spy, &c), 
like the word speech (sprechen) in English, has reference 
to the expressiomof the inner nature outwardly, upon the 
face and form, so that it can be understood and sympa- 
thized with. 

The e human family' is an expression merely implying 
the common interests of mankind, as against the forest 
and the flood, wild beasts and hostile elements ; while it 
includes the ideas of possible fraternity, consanguinity, 
intermarriage, and fellowships of every spiritual grade. 
When the apostle wrote ' for of one blood he hath made 
all the dwellers upon earth/ he shared the indefinite no- 
tions of that and every other age, and expressed his Chris- 
tian philanthropy in the usual way, quite sufficient for his 
purpose. 

Our inquiry is of another order. Science is obliged to 
restrict words to one meaning. At the outset of a mathe- 
matical discussion the value of x is unknown ; but at the 
close of it, the value of x is made out to be some one 



ON THE UNITY OF MANKIND. 95 

certain quantity, and no other, We have not yet made 
out the value of x in the discussion of species. We still 
use the terms race and. family in a loose way. We talk of 
the various races of mankind, — the black race, the white 
race, the yellow race, the red race. We even subdivide 
these, and speak of four or five black races, i. e. the Caribs 
of S. America, the blacks of Northern Africa, the blacks of 
Southern Africa, the Negrito race of the Andaman islands, 
and the Milanesians of the Eastern Archipelago. Some- 
times our subdivisions become small and numerous ; e. g. 
we divide the white race into the Arian and , Shemitic 
branches ; and then subdivide the Shemitic branch into 
the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Coptic, the Phoenician, and 
other races. Ethnologists, therefore, differ in their classi- 
fication of human races so much, that the number ranges 
from three to thirty. The questions which start up for 
their consideration are questions of detail, and the word 
race has, in common ethnology, got to confining itself to 
these details. 

But it carries a larger significance ; it has the same 
scope with the word species, with this difference : viz. that 
the word species reminds us of other animals beside man, 
and excites the question of their possible consanguinity 
with him ; while the word race excites only the question ^ 
of one man's relationship to another. 

My lecture this evening will therefore deal with these 
two subjects : race and species ; or, in other words, with the 
distinctions of human races, and their origins. I state it 
in this form, so as to get rid of the transcendental discus- 
sion of speciesj9er.se, which would absorb the whole even- 
ing and lead us to no results after all. And I take them 
in this reversed order of time because I do not believe in 
a priori science. We must take existing facts first, and 
argue back from them to what has been fact in times past. 

But before investigating the facts of the case, I must 
state the condition of our apparatus for the investigation. 
Taking the sciences in their order : what means do they 
afford us for determining the unity of the human race ? 

From the group of the mathematical sciences we get our 
calculations of the increase of human population ; our 
knowledge of the relations established between physical 
geography and human migrations ; and between climate 



96 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 

and character. We get also certain wonderful glimpses 
into the mystery of change of organic form, which, whether 
retained by the Creator in his own hand, or deposited by 
him as an efficient cause in nature, is, in any view you 
may take of it, the great central subject of this investiga- 
tion. 

From the group of the inorganic sciences we receive the 
discussion of facts only hinted at in the last lecture ; the 
fossil remains of primeval men and of contemporaneous 
animals, and, moreover, our ideas of time. 

From the organic sciences we get our laws of species- 
variation ; laws which rule over both kingdoms, the veget- 
able and the animal, and therefore over man. Compara- 
tive anatomy, describing its collections, defines for us the 
limits of similarity and dissimilarity between the fossil 
species and those now existing; between the monkey 
tribes and the tribes of mankind • between the skulls found 
in the bone-caverns, and the skulls of Casper Hauser and 
Daniel Webster; between the skeleton and the skin of 
Hottentots and of Englishmen. 

From the historical sciences, of which Ethnology is one, 
we get those facts which, on the one hand, teach the per- 
manence of those great distinctions upon which our largest 
classification of human races is founded ; and, on the other 
hand, teach those easy and rapid modifications of the human 
form and features, through civilization or decivilization, 
which may well make us liberal in our judgments, both 
towards those, who insist upon one Adam from whom all 
blacks and whites, yellow men and red men, have descended, 
and also towards those who insist upon the generation of 
man from the ape. Herewith come in those volumes of 
archseological suggestions ; pictures of men and dogs upon 
the tombs of the Pharaohs ; images of ancient Hindu aud 
Chinese deities ; skeletons of Greeks and Romans, Gauls 
and Finns, buried in tombs and tumuli of every age, back 
through the Modern, the Iron, the Bronze, and the Stone 
periods. Surely we ought to be able to come to some con- 
clusion, however modestly, as to whether mankind is and 
has always been of one race ; and whether there are signs 
of a transition from degraded ape-like forms, up to the 
noblest figure of a man. But the list of our opportunities 
is not yet complete. 



V.] OF MANKIND. 97 

From the social sciences we get statistics, not 'only of 
the present, but of the past conditions of human life; we 
see how the arts and arms of men have come into existence 
and been improved, increased, and perfected, in striking 
parallelism with human form and human intellect ; part of 
that development of the idea of man, which itself forms 
but a part of a still grander development of the idea of 
universal nature. The study of ancient commerce reflects 
light upon the theory of migrations, and helps to distin- 
guish the characteristics of races. The study of ancient 
war is, in fact, the tracing of migrations as they became 
accomplished facts, influencing mixtures of races, and ex- 
plaining the reappearance of Mongol faces in Western 
Pennsylvania. By the study of ancient law (as the mag- 
nificent book of Lewis, just published, proves) we get 
laws of natural selection, which even Darwin hardly 
dreamed of; by which races were subdivided, and new 
forms contracted for, to become permanent in after times. 
Lastly, from the intellectual sciences, we learn: 1. how 
to distinguish the races of mankind through language, 
and to track them in their lat&r marchings and counter- 
marchings across the continents and seas; 2. how to dis- 
tinguish races by their fine arts, their ethics, their wor- 
ships ; bat above all, 3. we get some clear notion of man's 
relation to the brute, and are thus enabled to introduce 
into the purely materialistic discussion of the development 
theory, based on fossils, and on comparative anatomy, 
those higher considerations which naturally and properly 
must have most weight with sensible, religious, Christian 
people. 

The last condition of mankind, namely, that in which 
we see it now existing, resembles the last condition of the 
rock-crust of the earth, namely, that in which we see it 
constituting the deltas and the valley-terraces of existing 
rivers. What is this condition ? It is one of disintegra- 
tion, confusion, intermixture. Examine a handful of the 
gravel which comes in daily from Roxbury to be dumped 
into the Back Bay, and say what are its constituent ele- 
ments ? and where they originated ? Pebbles of quartz, 
of porphyry, of micaslate, of gneiss, of syenite, white, 
black, red, green, and blue are there ; tell me their several 
ages, their ancient starting-points, the course of the ice- 

7 



98 ON THE UNITY [liECT* 

berg, the glacier, or the current which brought them to 
the quarry. The data exist. Guyot has traced the ancient 
moraines of Switzerland back to the existing glaciers, and 
thus to their mother peaks among the Alps. Nature 
writes out in full all her family trees. With care you can 
interpret them to a certainty. A labourer collecting 
cobble-stones at the falls of the Delaware near Trenton, 
for the pavements of Philadelphia, may wonder how this or 
that one can happen to differ so widely from those about it. 
Vanuxem, or Conrad, or James Hall would tell him, by 
certain marks upon it, that it was a piece of coral ; that it 
.grew originally in what is now the valley of the Mohawk ; 
that ice and rain had carried it down the whole course of 
the river Delaware from Cooperstown to tide ; and that 
the pebbles, among which it lies, are red sand- stones of a 
later age from Newburgh, quartzites of an older age from 
Easton, blue slates from the Water Gap, iron-stones from 
Milford, and copper- slates from Port Deposit. 

Modern cities are the gravel-banks of humanity. Dis- 
integrated races of mankind are drifted into them. Of the 
600,000 inhabitants of Philadelphia, a rude one-tenth have 
been brought to it on those pitiless ice-bergs, the slave- 
ships, from the southern continent of the old world, and 
represent all the principal subdivisions of the black races. 
A second tenth has been supplied by Suabia, Switzerland, 
Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, Hungary, and other native 
lands of the Sclavonic race. A third tenth has come from 
Northern Germany and Scandinavia, and represents the 
Teutonic race, in its two branches. A fourth and fifth are 
Celts, from Ireland and Wales, the west of Scotland, and 
the north and west of France, mixed in with Celt Iberians 
of Spain and Italy. The rest are lowland Scotch and 
English, a mongrel people made up of Celtic Britons, and 
Teutonic Franks and Saxons, Scandinavian Normans, with 
Slavic, Finnish, Tartar, and Shemitic streaks of blood. 
The Shemitic race is represented by thousands of Jews. 
And on the wharves are seen Cooleys from India and 
China, Malays from Singapore, and Canakas from Hawaii. 

Two opposing laws work mightily and incessantly over 
the ethnology of such a place. One is the law of mixture, 
tending to obliterate all distinctions of race and to produce 
new types ; the other is the law of segregation, tending to 



y.] OF MANKIND. 99 

draw tlie individuals of each stock together and to repro- 
duce those original distinctions. 

Under the first law, and by the intermarriage of the 
black race with the whites, we have mulattoes of every 
grade of colour, stature, and facial angle. Whether an 
improvement be the consequence men are not yet agreed. 
The circumstances have not yet been favourable for settling 
that question, nor will be until black and white can mix 
on terms of reasonable equality, each bringing to the 
other its own peculiar characteristics in full and free de- 
velopment. With regard to the races not so widely separ- 
ated by nature or by circumstances, improvement by in- 
termixture is an established truth. In middle Pennsylvania 
and Virginia, for example, wherever intermarriage has 
taken place between North-Irish presbyterian Saxons, and 
the families of the old Swope and Hessian emigrants, a 
magnificent mongrel breed of people fills the valleys of the 
Susquehanna, Juniata, and Potomac, with frames of steel 
and brains of flame, the stuff of which heroes, poets, and 
philosophers are made. No one can avoid observing the 
rapid improvement of the Celtic race in the United States, 
wherever it is free to cross itself with Teutonic blood. 
Let all due weight be given to the other elements of pro- 
gress, superior food, superior labour, superior education, 
still we cannot fail to recognize the crossing of the breeds 
as the chief hope of the nation. Civilization is the flower 
of migration. Every great history has sprung from some 
barbaric invasion. A new humanity follows every deluge. 
Arts and learnings are the electric lights about the wire- 
points where two races approximate. One kind of blood 
is metal to the acid of another : mix them in generous 
proportions and you have Hare's calorimotor on a cosmical 
scale; you can burn up with it the past, or electrotype 
with it the future. When the effervescence ceases the 
Creator walks away ; the apparatus is useless until it is 
charged anew. 

By the law of segregation, on the other hand, the Ger- 
mans of Philadelphia have drawn off into the north- 
eastern quarter of the city, and made a Frankfort-on-the- 
Maine of it. The blacks have appropriated the southern 
wards and made a Timbuctoo of them. The Irish cluster 
about their churches, the Jews about their synagogues, 



100 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 

without need of legislative enactments. The west end of 
one of the finest streets in Cincinnati is formed by rows of 
palaces, built since the middle of the war, and all inhabited 
by Jews. The principal Quaker families of Philadelphia 
still reside in Arch-street — a beautiful meeting-house, a 
mile long, and so monotonous that you might turn it end 
for end, or upside down, and nobody should perceive the 
difference. 

But when groups of tourmaline or spinel segregate in 
the old or metamorphic rocks, they are signs of age or 
long stagnation. A city with established quarters of dis- 
tinct nationalities cannot improve at the same rate with a 
city like Chicago or St Louis, where confusion of races 
pervades the place. Arch- street has been an iron bar 
between its legs to the city of William Penn. The pro- 
hibitory tariff which the south so long laid against the im- 
portation of Yankee blood was that which made Charles 
Sumner's speech so dreadfully true. The Indian tribes of 
North America fossilized themselves by isolation ; and now 
they perish because they cannot marry into a stronger 
family. In the earlier ages of mankind this law of segre- 
gation ruled despotically. And why ? Because it is the 
law which guards the individual life, without regard to the 
improvement of the race. That other law of disintegra- 
tion and intermixture patronizes the improvement of the 
race and disregards the life of the individual. What do 
the forces of civilization care for the happiness or misery 
of the individual coal-miner that furnishes fuel for its 
steam-engine, or the sailor who brings it over the sea, or 
the engine-driver who is smashed on the experimental trip, 
or the factory girl, or the telescopic-lens grinder, or the 
Lord Premier who commits suicide, or the First Consul 
who eats his broken heart at St Helena ? Nothing. 
Christianity, indeed, sympathizes with each, and at the 
same time with all, and thus observes both laws, and em- 
ploys them, both for the happiness of the individual and 
for the progress of the race. But Christianity is a recent 
device of the Deity. Our theme antedates it a million 
years, if Desnoyer's tertiary bones were really scratched 
and split by the hands of men. 

Questions to-night will come up such as these : Of what 
race of men are Desnoyer's tertiary human bones the 



V.] OF MANKIND. 101 

vestiges ? In what street of Paris or Boston will you find 
their present representatives ? Was it that primeval race 
which afterwards fashioned the flint implements buried in 
the post-tertiary diluvium of Abbeville ; and those found 
in the bone-caverns of Belgium? Was it the race whose 
skeletons lie mouldering in the tumuli of the Stone period 
here or there ? Is it one of the great existing races of 
the present day ? How many existing races really are 
there ? How can we distinguish them apart now that they 
are so intermixed ? And if we can distinguish them apart, 
can we also arrange them in any hierarchy, or natural order 
of mutual excellence ? Are any of them essentially and 
incurably bestial ? Can there be established any rational 
connection between the lowest races of mankind existing 
now and the oldest skulls and skeletons ? Can we in any 
way make these an intermediate link between the Christian 
gentleman and the abominable chimpanzee ? 

These questions have been discussed by many writers, 
and been taken up in almost every order. Each writer has 
given greater prominence to one or other of them, accord- 
ing to the special nature of his studies. Perhaps the clear- 
est statement of them has been made by Carl Yogt, Pro- 
fessor of Comparative Anatomy in the Academy at Geneva, 
in a series of lectures delivered at Neuenburg, in one of the 
valleys of the Swiss Jura, and published in two volumes at 
Giessen, in 1864. His collection of facts, down to the 
most recent discoveries of last year, is comprehensive. 
His searching criticism of the various and opposite 
opinions held still by men of science, illustrate the whole 
subject. His reputation as an anatomist is of the highest 
rank. His independence is as admirable as his scientific 
method is clear and straightforward. Whether his classi- 
fication of the human races will fare better than those of 
his predecessors or not, the strong ground of his general 
conclusions, I think, cannot be shaken. They are not, in 
fact, his conclusions ; they are the provisional sentiments 
of a large number of the leaders of science, for the 
moment produced by the sum total of our information up 
to date, and subject of course to constitutional amendment 
according to law. As such I offer them for your con- 
sideration this evening. 

I stated in general terms in my last lecture that no dif- 



102 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 

ference could be made out between man and the monkey 
as to the ground-plan of their forms. Their hands are 
planned like human hands, their feet like human feet, their 
brains like human brains, their jaws and teeth like human 
jaws and teeth, and so of all other parts of their organiza- 
tion. 

The same, of course, can be asserted respecting the dif- 
ferent races of men ; they are all built upon one plan. If 
this makes them all of one race, then it becomes also 
necessary to assert that men and monkeys are of one race, 
because they are built upon a common plan. 

The differences which do exist, both between men and 
monkeys, and between one race of men and another, as 
well as between one race of monkeys and another, are 
differences in the development of this ground-plan common 
to all. Take the idea of the skull for an instance : it may 
be more ape-like or more man-like ; it may be brachy- 
cephalic, i. e. short for its width, or dolichocephalic, i. e. 
long for its width ; it may have a low, retreating fore- 
head, or a high, erect forehead ; it may show a perfectly 
symmetrical curve, when seen sidewise or endwise, or it 
may be lumpy and knobby, like a laurel root ; it may be 
high and pointed; or immensely developed behind the 
ears ; or all brought forwards over the eyes ; or bulging 
over the ears sideways ; it may be marked by ridges and 
crests, fore and aft, and from side to side. All these differ- 
ences you are accustomed to meet in your daily walks ; and 
these same kinds of differences you would see if you ex- 
tended your walks to the forests of the tropics. The sub- 
ject is one of degrees, or rather one of details. Just as, 
to use one of Vogt's illustrations, when an architect is 
showing his scholars the essential unity of plan which re- 
sides in all Gothic domes he explains the various ways in 
which the idea of this plan is unfolded in the different 
cathedrals of Europe. 

And so of all other parts of the human organism as of 
all other members of the Gothic edifice. We cannot take 
one part as our criterion ; we must take the whole animal, 
the whole man. The shape of the skull is very important, 
because very changeable, and because skulls are attainable 
when no other vestige of man remains to be examined. 
But the shape of the limbs, the colour of the skin and 



T-] 



OF MANKIND. 



103 



e3^es, the growth of tlie hair — in a word, the entire aspect 
of the person must, in the end, decide for ns his affinities, 
and enable us to fix those limits of variation which con- 
stitute a race. Any other method of classification would 
be empirical and not natural. 

To show you how careful we must be to take every part 
of the phenomenon into consideration, and to give you an 
additional illustration of the delicacy and shrewdness of 
modern methods of investigation, I will adduce a couple of 
facts connected with the measurement of human skulls. 
It does not necessarily follow that small skulls contain 
feeble brains, nor that small brains in one century may not 
become larger in another century. 

The action of the brain seems dependent upon its folded 
surface. ■ Wagner has shown by the following table that 
women's brains weigh less than men's, but that their sur- 
faces when unfolded and spread out equal or exceed those 
of men : — 



Number. 


Weight in 
gramms. 


Convex surface in 
16 Dram of great squares. 


1. (Dirichlet) 


1520 


2553 


2. (Fuchs) 


1499 


2489 


3. (Gauss) 


1492 


2419 


4. (Hermann) 


1358 


2406 


5. Man 


1340 


2451 


6. ■» 


1330 


2309 


7. „ 


1273 


2117 


8. Woman 


1254 


2498 


9. (Hausmann) 


1226 


3065 


10. Woman 


1223 


2272 


11 » 


1185 


2300 


12. Mikrocephalus (ic 


liot) 300 


896 



Man, 1499 gramms weight and 2489 of surface. 
Woman, 1254 „ „ 2498 of surface. 

It is possible thus to explain the small head and womanly 
intellectuality of the Hindu race.* 

Another such fact is one that Brocaf discovered by his 
measurement of skulls obtained from two, Parisian grave- 
yards as old or older than the time of Philip Augustus, i. e. 
of the twelfth century. It goes to show that the average 



Vogt, vol. i. p. 137. 



f Ibid. pp. 106, 108. 



104 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 

size of the skull of the same race may increase in the 
course of time. 115 of these skulls from one graveyard 
gave the mean size of 1461.53 cubic centimetres; 117 
skulls from another graveyard gave 1409.31 cubic centi- 
metres; while that of 125 skulls of paupers, buried in a 
modern Parisian cemetery (1788 — 1824) in spite of the 
debasing influences of poverty, measured 1484.23. 

Morlot in comparing the shape and size of a multitude 
of ancient Helvetian skulls which he examined, with the 
skulls of their descendants, the Genevese of the present 
day, comes to the same conclusion, and ascribes the im- 
provement to the influence of Christianity. 

Great discussion has been had over this matter of change 
in the form of the human skull, on the one side under the 
influence of favourable circumstances, and of unfavourable 
circumstances on the other. The factitious reputation 
which the English^ Pritchard acquired came from his 
assiduous collection and collation of supposed examples of 
the degeneracy of people through misfortune, and of the 
improvement of other people through good fortune. His 
instances of the Turks, of the Jews, of the Irish, are well 
known. He thought that facts warranted him in assert- 
ing that the bow-legged and savage-featured horsemen of 
Independent Tartary had become in two or three centuries 
the straight-legged handsome aristocrats of Constanti- 
nople. That the white Jews of Palestine had become under 
an Indian sky the black Jews of Madras. That the tall, 
stout, clever Irish of Meath, when driven by the English 
from their farms to huddle half- starved in mud-huts in the 
south-west corner of the Green Isle, became in a few 
generations the ugly, low-browed, meagre-limbed, pot- 
bellied, brutal creatures, whom the famine drove in crowds 
to this country, and whose well-fed children now constitute 
a class of our society not at all inferior to any other, as far 
as physical and mental development is concerned. 

This story of the Irish has been again taken up by one 
of the most exact ethnologists of our own day, M. Quatre- 
fages of Paris. I will give it in his own words : — 

'When the British suppressed the Irish rebellions of 
1649 and 1689, great crowds of native Irish were driven 
out from Armagh and the south of county Down, in one di- 
rection, into the mountains between Flews and the sea, 



V.] OP MANKIND. . 105 

and in the other, into Leitrim, Sligo, and Mayo.' From 
that time on, these people suffered the evil influence of 
hunger and ignorance, those two great spoilers of man- 
kind. Their descendants may be easily distinguished at 
the present day from their relatives left in Meath in good 
estate. They are marked by open, protruding mouths, 
projecting teeth, and fletschendern gums, high cheek- 
bones, suppressed noses, and barbarous foreheads. In 
Sligo and northern Mayo, two centuries of wretchedness 
have stamped themselves upon the whole bodily constitu- 
tion, within and without, furnishing us with an example of 
human degeneration through known causes, so instructive 
for the future, as to compensate for the misery of the past. 
Their mean height is about 5 ft 2 inches ; they are thick- 
bellied, crook-legged, like mis-begotten children ; clad in 
rags they go about, the ghosts of a once full- sized, well- 
bodied, and courageous people. In other quarters of the 
island where this same Irish race has suffered no such 
lamentable miseries, it furnishes the fairest examples of 
human strength and beauty, not only physical but intel- 
lectual also. Yet this account, which makes one's hair 
bristle with horror, is sufhcient to show how easily it can 
be lowered to a level with, and be made to show all the 
characteristics of, the lowest negro races, the most aban- 
doned Australian tribes.'' 

I have selected from a great many others and given you 
in full this description of a case, which has made perhaps 
the profoundest impression upon the imagination of eth- 
nologists, because it will not only make the question before 
us plain, but will show how differently different investi- 
gators conclude their inferences from the same facts. 

Pritchard, and his numerous old- school followers, see in 
this history only a fine example of man's susceptibility to 
change, and they prove by it and other like examples, that 
satiety and hunger, heat and cold, field-life and forest-life, 
mountain-air and sea-air, have been ample means for 
changing the descendants of the first pair, Adam and Eve, 
or of the second pair, Noah and Anna, into all the black, 
white, yellow, and red descriptions of mankind which now 
inhabit the globe. But in order to maintain this theory 
they are obliged to ignore or explain away a multitude 
of adverse facts, going to show that this capacity of man 



106 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 

for change is so limited that any race subjected to ad- 
versity beyond a certain point, not only degenerates but 
perishes entirely, like any other kind of animal. 

This opposite view has been taken up with the same ex- 
cessive advocacy, and want of logical balance, by Dr Knox 
and his school, who go to the extent of maintaining that 
no migration is possible ; that the number of original 
human races is very great ; that each of them was created 
to occupy a certain definite area and can occupy no other ; 
that any translation of it from that area to another is 
necessarily fatal ; and that the degeneration of the Irish 
vagabonds from Meath was as certain a premonition of 
extinction as the degeneration of the European emigrants 
to these United States must end in the extinction of our 
race, unless it be enabled to drag out a lingering existence 
here by large and constant accessions of fresh life from 
Europe. 

Such speculations are not scientific. We call Prit chard 
an old fogy ; we . call Knox a crazy fellow. We must not 
only have alleged facts, we must have actual facts, sifted, 
analyzed, weighed, and measured, before we can begin to 
see our way through such a world of mystery as is this 
question of races. This sifting of facts is what character- 
izes the ethnology of the last few years. 

You will ask, what opinion does Quatrefages entertain 
of the case which he cites so eloquently, and as if he fully 
coincided with Pritchard's cherished sentiments ? Be not 
surprised when I tell you that he doubts the facts them- 
selves. He quietly asks if it be not possible that the two 
classes of Irish peasantry thus contrasted, the one de- 
graded to a level with Australians, the other allied to the 
most favoured Caucasians, ever really had anything to do 
with each other. ( No/ says he, ( the Irishman of Meath 
alone i*epresents the old stock, he has remained at home, 
he has remained unaltered. The Irishman of Flews, on 
the contrary, placed in other circumstances, has changed 
himself and formed a new race out of the old one, in har- 
mony with its unhappy surroundings. There are therefore 
now two races in these neighbouring counties.'' 

And what has Vogt, again, to say to this ? Vogt smiles 
at Quatrefages' ingenious subterfuge. Supposing the 
details of the Irish story to be -true, how does it affect the 



V.] OF MANKIND. . 107 

question of the radical distinction between the skull of a 
white Celt and the skull of an Australian negro ? Who 
has examined the skulls of these degraded Irishmen of 
Flews, and compared them in the light of the latest science 
with the skulls of the Irishmen of Meath, their alleged 
cousins on the one side, to make out the differences, and 
with the skulls of Australians on the other side to make 
out the resemblance ? Has Pritchard ? Has Quatrefages ? 
Has Broca ? Has Morton or Bachman ? Has Scherzer and 
Schwarz ? Has Busk, or Camper, or Welcker, or Yon 
Baer, or Virchow, or Lucas, or Gratiolet, or Huschke, or 
Aiken Meigs, or anybody ? Nobody ! Then what does our 
actual knowledge about it amount to after all ? To nothing. 
There being no competent witnesses the case is ruled out 
of court. 

We might spend much time in showing how all the old 
and well-established points of controversy are broken off, 
in pretty much the same manner, by want of proper pre- 
liminary criticism. In the Turkish case, for instance : 
who knows how much of the old Turkoman element still 
lingers at Constantinople ? And where did the Turks 
obtain mothers for their children but from the population 
of the empire, which they spent more than one lifetime in 
overthrowing ; to say nothing about the mountain beauties 
of the Caucasus. 

In the case of the black Jews of India : who does not 
know that the black Jews of Abyssinia boast that they are 
the descendants, not of the patriarchs, but of the Queen 
of Sheba ? Their Judaism is therefore a superstition over- [ 
laid upon their blood, and cannot be adduced in proof 
that their Israelitish blood has ever changed even by the 
thousandth part of an atom of iron. 

Take the case of the negroes in America, of which Lyell, 
and Reiset, and Reclus have written so glibly; and who 
knows anything with certainty about it ? A land, indeed, 
of darkness and of the valley of death. We must wait 
until the negroes take up the question themselves ; until 
a truth-telling census gives us facts; until a thorough 
and searching discrimination has been exercised. Men 
pretend to say that the negro race has been marvellously 
modified by mere change of habitat, by new climates, soils, 
and foods ; or as they are sometimes inclined to fancy, by 



108 ON THE UNITY [lECT. 

mysterious or, at least, unknown agencies. Reclus asserts 
his positive knowledge of the fact that, as a race, the 
negroes have advanced one-fourth way towards the form 
and appearance of the whites. Reiset opines that the 
pure-blooded Africans of the Antilles retain their native 
character, only weakened. Some writers confidently insist 
that the negro skin is not so black, his nose not so small, 
his forehead higher, his lips thinner, than they used to be. 
Even if it were possible to discover and prove all this to 
be true, what would it signify when we consider the con- 
sistent and universal profligacy of the whites who have 
lived among them, and have been their absolute masters ; 
when we consider the immense variety of thick and thin 
lipped, high and low browed, large and small nosed tribes 
in Africa, from which the dreadful sum of all that evil was 
made up ; and lastly, when we consider the operation of 
the internal slave trade, that Virginian pudding- stick, 
stirred by the hand of Mammon, for ever mixing up these 
various original and derived ingredients together, to pro- 
duce a chaos of results, before which any man, were he 
not a Charleston clergyman or a foreign tourist, would 
stand awe- struck and silent. 

Lastly, take our own Yankee case. Listen, if you can, 
without indulging in a hearty laugh, to the following de- 
scription, by Pruner Bey, of the results of European emi- 
gration to America. ' Already, after the second genera- 
tion/ says this shrewd observer, c the Yankee shows the 
features of the Indian type. Later still, his lymphatic 
system becomes reduced to the minimum of its normal de- 
velopment. The skin grows dry as leather ; the warmth 
of the complexion and the ruddiness of the cheeks are 
lost — exchanged, in the man, for a clayey tint ; in the 
woman, for a sickly paleness. The head grows smaller, 
round or even pointed, and covers itself with straight, 
dark hair; the neck elongates, and one can see a great 
development of muscle in the cheek and jaw. The temples 
deepen ; the cheek-bones grow massive ; the eyes sink 
into deep orbits and lie close together. The iris is dark ; 
the glance grows piercing and wild. The long bones be- 
come still longer, especially those of the upper limbs, so 
that gloves of a peculiar shape, with very long fingers, 
are manufactured in France and England for the American 



V.] OP MANKIND. .109 

market. The inner holes of these bones become narrow ; 
the nails grow light, long, and pointed; the woman's pel- 
vis approximates in shape to that of the man/ ' And 
thus/ adds Quatrefages, ( the Anglo-Saxon type in America 
has become changed, and a new white race has sprung out 
of the old English race, to which we may give the name of 
Yankee race/ 

Now all this, to one accustomed to see the beautiful 
women of New England and the fine-looking men of the 
middle States, is sheer nonsense. Every intelligent citizen 
of the United States has travelled enough to know that 
the picture which Pruner Bey has given us represents no 
such general reality as to be of the least ethnological im- 
portance. It is a picture of individual heads, faces, and 
forms, which contrast strongly with other and widely dif- 
ferent heads, faces, and forms among whom they live, and, 
moreover, such as may be seen all over Europe. There is 
not even a well-marked class of society in the United 
States to answer the description. And as for a Yankee 
race, no such thing exists, in the sense assigned to the 
word by these authors. Even in New England there are 
recognized nearly half a dozen varieties of man. I could 
take you to a valley in Pennsylvania, fifty miles long by 
five miles wide, crossed by an invisible ethnological line, 
north-east of which the inhabitants are stout, strong- 
headed, handsome descendants of north Irish Presby- 
terians ; while south-west from it the inhabitants are 
Awmish descendants of Swiss mountaineers, equally good- 
looking in their way. Behind this valley, and on the 
summit of the Alleghany mountains, 3000 feet above the 
sea, Count Galitzin established his colony of Polish 
Catholics, and their monastery is still in use, and so is 
their cathedral. Twenty miles farther north, in the heart 
of the forest, is the settlement of a wealthy Englishman. 
Thirty miles farther north, still deeper in the forest, and 
on still higher ground, spread out the fields of St Mary's, 
tilled by over ten thousand French Catholics. Forty miles 
north-east of this, and in the centre of the great forests of 
the Sinnemahoning, Ole Bull founded his unhappy colony 
of Swedes. Forty miles to the north of this again would 
bring us to the settlements of the Connecticut men, up on 
the head waters of the Alleghany river ; and an equal dis- 



110 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 

tance to the south would return us among the descendants 
of the race which inhabited the Black Forest and the 
Vosges. 

Go from State to State,, and such facts will face you 
everywhere. You may draw two lines across the State of 
Ohio., so as to cut it into three regions, each with a separate 
ethnological development, distinct in appearance, in their 
manners and customs, in peculiarities of language, and in 
their religious habits. 

But what is that Anglo-Saxon race, concerning which 
we have heard so much, and to which no one has yet suc- 
ceeded in giving a form ? Yogt well says that it has no 
existence ; Max Miiller confirms the statement, if it 
needed confirmation. It is a chaos of races, this so-called 
Anglo-Saxon race. And so is the population of the United 
States a chaos of races ; an ethnological moraine, or gravel 
terrace, or delta deposit, to recur to the illustration already 
used. We cannot yet learn from it anything respecting 
those great laws of human variation which, sooner or later, 
will be discovered. 

What the other sciences wait for is this ; that ethnology 
should adopt some correct method of investigation. It 
has been well said that ofttimes a proper method of in- 
vestigating is a grander and more useful discovery than 
any which the investigation itself may yield. For the 
discovery of a right method is so much absolute abstract 
science accomplished, involving as it does the knowledge 
of principal truths in their prime relations ; whilst the dis- 
coveries which result from an investigation are commonly 
themselves mere isolated facts ; and facts are good for no- 
thing until they are synthetically converted into laws. 

Now the difficulty of devising a proper method for ethno- 
logical research arises from the fact that there are two oppo- 
site tendencies in nature — the one towards differentiation or 
individualization, the other towards integration or gener- 
alization. Nature is for ever at war with herself, pulling 
down with one hand while building up with the other. 
She obeys blindly the law of Christ, not to let her left 
hand know what her right hand doeth. She keeps races 
separate ; she mixes them together. She gives to man an 
intense love of home, a powerful associative principle, the 
rage of love, the fire of friendship, the pride of country, 



y.] OF MANKIND. Ill 

the bigotry of worship, the jealous guardianship of property 
— all this to develope the family and preserve the local 
type. On the other hand, she inspires the soul with a 
thirst for change, with curiosity concerning the distant and 
the new, with the love of conquests, with the hopes of 
betterment — all these to develope the powers of the indi- 
vidual man, and at the same time to spread out population 
as widely as possible. 

These are at home with the natural law that offspring 
should bear the characteristic features of both father and 
mother. And if this were the only law of inheritance, it 
would be easy enough to make out the exact forms and 
limits of each race, for its individuals would be alike. 
But there is another law in force, by which each child 
inherits only a limited selection of the characteristic 
features of father and mother ; and one child more of one, 
and another child more of another. One child takes on 
the physical form of the father with the mental character of 
the mother ; another child reverses the order, and resem- 
bles the father in mind, and the mother in body. This 
latter law, therefore, modifies and confuses the former, 
establishing individual variety in the midst of stirpal uni- 
formity. But in doing so it also provides a potent means 
for bringing into the history of a family a more or less 
complete divergence from the original type ; in fact, the 
production of a new race out of an old one. Were this 
the only law, ethnology would be an impossible science. 
Utter confusion would attend the history of human life. 

But a third law has been moreover discovered. It is 
called in the natural history of the lower creatures, the 
law of alternate generation, by which the jelly-fish begets 
a star-fish, and the star-fish in turn begets a jelly-fish. 
This law is strangely powerful over human character. 
I think that, as a rule, a child is more likely to resemble [ 
its grandparents than its parents. By this law hereditary ( 
diseases, like scrofula and insanity, and mental and bodily 
peculiarities of every kind, appear, lie hid, and re-appear, 
in a series of alternate generations. This is, in fact, that 
conservative force in nature which strives perpetually 
against abnormal variation, and insists upon a return to 
the old idea. This is the-mysterious under-current by 
which Mongol heads and faces are forced to the surface of 



112 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 

some Teutonic or Celtic stream. 1 have seen profiles in Phi- 
ladelphia which might have been copied from the alabas- 
ter tablets of Khorsabad — pure Assyrian faces, no doubt 
the product of Hebrew blood, descended through forty 
centuries from Ur of the Chaldees. 

The power of this preserving force of type, whatever 
may be its nature, stamps the great areas of the earth/ s 
surface with those unmistakable generalizations, to which 
no amount or intensity of individual variation can make us 
blind. It is the genius of the race. On the oldest monu- 
ments of the Pharaohs, the pictures of different kinds of 
dog are recognized by any child as the pictures of the dogs 
with which he plays to-day. The pictures of the Negro, 
the Jew, the Egyptian, the Scythian, are perfect likenesses 
of the Nubians, Fellahs, Jews, and Turks of to-day. There 
you may see, portrayed in colours 6000 years old, the same 
slave-traders driving down the same slave conies as in the 
same valley of the Nile to-day. If all the races of mankind 
are variants by the law of variation, from the form of Noah 
or of Adam, then how infinitely remote must have been /the 
time when Noah or Adam lived. On the other hand, if 
the law of constancy in form has kept the races apart from 
the beginning, how numerous must be the list of actual 
human races ; how closely must they have been confined 
to their respective centres of creation ; and how difficult 
it becomes for ethnology to devise any efficient and reliable 
method of research, for explaining the mixture of races in 
the more civilized portions of the earth ! 

Let me fix your attention for a moment on this curious 
map of France, published in the memoirs of the Eoyal 
Asiatic Society many years ago. It exhibits the depart- 
ments of the French empire, each overspread with a dif- 
ferent shade of colour, and marked with a certain cypher. 
This map affords a brilliant example of ethnological method. 
You are perhaps aware that the French, as a people, are 
mulattoes ; but a general observation like that, advances us 
scarcely a step in true science, although it may be quite 
sufficient to stifle the clamour which slaveholders have 
raised against the possibility of l miscegenation/ It is in 
the highest degree desirable to know in what sense and to 
what extent the French people are mulattoes ; in what pro- 
vinces and departments they are most dark, and in what 



V.] OF MANKIND. 113 

other provinces and departments they are mostr white. 
If we could discover by some accurate method — say by 
that of percentages — some law of increase of the dark 
element in French blood in some one direction, and of the 
white element in some other, we should come into posses- 
sion of means for tracing the mixture to the former seats 
of a dark race in the first direction or on that side of 
France ; and of a white race whose seat was in the other 
direction on the opposite side of France. Now that is pre- 
cisely what this map enables us to do. You observe how 
the percentage-shades form belts running across the king- 
dom from N.W. to S.E., and how the darker belts are 
those upon the S.W. or Spanish side, while the lighter 
belts are on the N.E., or towards Germany. Until this 
map was constructed it was supposed that the abori- 
ginal population of France was to be sought for in the 
central region of the Cantal and the mountains of Auvergne. 
But you see how steadily and equally the aboriginal dark 
or '' brown ' race of France, as it is called, has been pressed 
down from the Rhine and the Channel, towards the Bay 
of Biscay and the Pyrenees. You see how the increase of 
its mixture with the fair German race has been in propor- 
tion to the. distance from the Rhine. As for the white 
race, it of course belonged to central Europe, and was 
either Sclavic or Teutonic, perhaps both, certainly in part 
Teutonic. But the dark race with which it mixed, — what 
shall we think of it ? Where shall we find it pure ? The 
map suggests the only answer to these questions. The 
colour deepens to a maximum where the Pyrenean 
mountains meet the sea. These mountains are the home of 
three divisions of one race, speaking three dialects of one 
language, called the Basque; a language possessing no 
well-proven affinities with any European tongue ; but sug- 
gesting some resemblances with the language of the Finns, 
a people perhaps related to the same circumpolar race to 
which the Esquimaux belong. These Basques are sturdy 
mountaineers and have never been driven from their homes ; 
but their mountains stood with their feet in the sea, and 
the Basques became great fishermen; the Cabots found 
the banks of Newfoundland covered with their boats, and 
it is said that they sold cod by name in the markets of 
Hamburg and Havre, before Columbus made his first voy- 



114 ON THE UNITY [lECT. 

age. The native word is not c Basque ' but f Escamara;' 
almost identical with Esquimaux. The west end of Brittany 
is peopled by a fragment of this same race, preserved in the 
same manner among rocks and in the surf, but who have 
exchanged their language for a Celtic dialect. St Malo was 
celebrated in the middle ages for its breed of sailors, who 
shared with the southern Basques in the fisheries of La- 
brador. Another, and exceedingly small, fragment of this 
mysterious and most ancient brown race exists in Ireland, 
in the shape of a group of hamlets on the northern shore 
of Galway bay ; the people intermarry among themselves 
and have little in common with the Celtic population of the 
country. Now if we track the brown race southward, we 
find it as a modifying element in all the Spanish peninsula, 
especially among the Sierras and in secluded Portugal. 
Whatever was its mixture with the Celtic blood of France, 
it formed with Celtic blood the entire humanity of Spain, 
and hence the name which the Eomans gave it, Celt Iberia. 
If we take this latter name Iberia, and compare it with 
a multitude of others, — I will not weary you with the de- 
tails, — we arrive at the conclusion, that in the brown race of 
western Europe we have a division of the great aboriginal 
Berber race of northern Africa ; a conclusion which it 
would have been impossible for the best ethnologist to 
have advanced with any confidence, until some such method 
of investigation had been adopted as this map illustrates.* 
Not by suppositions and conjectures, but only by a 
rigorous self-denial of the imagination, and by restricting 
it to its proper function, the invention of true methods of 
investigation, can the questions be answered which eth- 

* But after such investigations have been made, these direct observa- 
tions are of value. For example, in 1862, MM. Martins, Desor, and Escher 
de la Linth studied the Berbers in their native haunts. ' The Sufites/ 
writes Desor, ' are genuine Berbers, and, as such, white with clack hair, 
like the southern Europeans ; and were it not for their burnus, Martins 
might have recognized them for a troop of scholars from some village 
of Provence or Languedoc. But one thing drew our attention, the very 
extended form of the head ; they are true longheads (dolicho-cephaloi), as 
one sees chiefly only so well pronounced from the ancient graves ; the 
face is angular and thin, the teeth vertical and beautifully white like those 
of all these peoples. The body is lank, and capable of marvellous endur- 
ance.' (Letter to Liebig, p. 29.) I say nothing here of the superb train 
of argument coming out of the recent researches into the dolmen or Druid 
architecture of Europe and Africa. 



V.J OF MANKIND. .. 115 

nologists are asking of each other respecting similar mix- 
tures of the white and black races, in other parts of the 
world ; in India and Burmah, for example, where also the 
aboriginal element seems to have been black, and to have 
been mixed first with yellow Turanian blood from the north- 
east, and afterwards with white Arian blood from the north- 
west. Were this a course of lectures on Ethnology proper, 
I would gladly take up these questions one by one. But 
I must occupy the few minutes I have left, in sketching out 
the direction which the inquiry takes in bearing upon 
the connection of the present races with those of the Stone 
or Diluvial age, and with the apes and monkey tribes. 

The most nobly organized races are the most migratory, 
because they have the faculties of self-protection in the 
highest state of efficiency. The white Shemite,the Arab 
merchant, traffics in person every year from Morocco to 
Singapore. He has imprinted his alphabet, his cipher, his 
unitarianism, upon a belt of the earth's surface extending 
from the Senegal and Gambia to Lake Baikal. He has 
ennobled, by mixture with his own blood, the Khoord, the 
Nubian, the Berber, and the Celt. How far back this be- 
ginning of his influence would go, if we could follow it, 
we cannot yet make out. But what is true of this sub- 
division of the great white race is true of the white race 
as an entire whole. It has mowed a broad historic swath 
along the temperate zone, subjugating, proselyting, ele- 
vating the darker and poorer races which had previous 
possession of the earth, the less mixed and fragmentary 
remains of which we find among the mountains, or on pro- 
montories, or in islands in the sea. 

North of the belt of this historic white race lies the 
nearly undisturbed population of the Arctic zone. To the 
south of it dwell enormous separated masses of black men. 
I omit all mention here of the red Indians of America, so 
as not to complicate the subject.* 

* De Gobineau, in his ' Essai sur l'inegalite des Races Humaines/ 
Paris, 1853 (Phil. Lib.), devotes the 16th chapter of vol. i. to a descrip- 
tion of the characteristic features of the three type races ; but adds that 
at the earliest date we see them they were not pure, and that now they 
have been mixed a hundred times. (See foot-note to Lecture 8, p. 3.) 

The Melanian variety, he says, is at the bottom of the scale. The 
animal form of its pelvis fixes its destiny from the moment of conception. 



116 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 

These races seem to be as different in species as wolves 
and foxes differ from jackals and dogs. There is abso- 

(A "French, jeu d' esprit.) It never leaves the limits of restricted intel- 
lectuality. But it is no, brute, pure and simple, this negro with narrow, 
retreating forehead, carrying in the middle skull indications of certain 
grossly powerful energies. If its thinking faculties are middling, or re- 
duced to nothing, it possesses in desire, and therefore in its will, a terrible 
intensity. Many of its senses are developed with a vigour unknown to 
the two other races, especially the senses of taste and smell. But pre- 
cisely on the avidity of its sensations lies the stamp of its inferiority. 
All aliments are good for it ; nothing disgusts, nothing repulses it. 
(Primer, i. 133.) Its lust is to eat, to eat excessively, with fury. No 
carrion is unworthy of its stomach. Its lust for gross odours accommo- 
dates itself to those most odious. To these chief traits is added an un- 
stable humour, a fixless variability of sentiment, annulling the distinction 
between vice and virtue for this race. The very rage with which it pursues 
the object which has put its sensitivity into vibration and inflamed its 
cupidity, is a gauge for the prompt appeasing of the one and the rapid 
forgetfulness of the other. Lastly, it values as little its own life as 
another's. It kills to kill ; and so this human machine, so easy to set in 
motion, is, in the presence of suffering, of a cowardice taking refuge in 
death, or of a monstrous impassibility. 

The yellow race presents the antithesis of all this. The cranium pro- 
jects in front. Large, bony, salient often, developed well in height, ver- 
tical over a triangular face, wherein the nose and chin have none of those 
gross and rude projections of the negro. A tendency to obesity, though 
not a special trait, recurs more frequently in the yellow than in the other 
races. Little of physical vigour ; dispositions to apathy ; none of those 
strange moral excesses so common to the blacks. Feeble desires ; a will 
obstinate rather than extreme ; a taste perpetual but tranquil for material 
pleasures ; rarely gluttonous, but with more choice of aliments than the 
negro has. In all this, a tendency to mediocrity ; a comprehension quick 
enough, but neither elevated nor profound (quoting Cams, Weber Ung. 
etc., p. 60) ; a love of the useful ; respect for law ; conscious of the ad- 
vantages of a certain dose of liberty ; a practical race, in the narrow 
meaning of the word ; no dreamers nor lovers of theories ; inventing 
little, but able to appreciate and adopt what serves its turn ; their desires 
limited to living as softly and commodiously as they can ; a populace and 
small bourgeoisie, which every civilizer should choose for the basis of 
his society ; but not to give society nerve, beauty, or action. 

The white race has reflecting energy, or energetic intelligence ; the 
sense of the useful in a larger, higher, more courageous, more ideal sense ; 
a perseverance in plain view of obstacles, able to find means for removing 
them out of the way ; with a greater physical power ; an extraordinary 
instinct for order, not only as the gauge of peace and rest, but as the in- 
dispensable means of conservation ; and yet a well pronounced taste for 
liberty, even in extreme ; a declared hostility to that formal sleepy 
Chinese organization, as well as to a haughty despotism, the only bridle 
for the blacks. The white men are distinguished by a singular love of 
life, prized more because put to its proper uses by them. Their cruelty, 



V.] OF MANKIND. 117 

lutely no reason for supposing them to be of one' species, 
except an absurd legend, ascribed to an ancient Shemitic 
law-giver, and preserved among a number of similar 
legends of various dates, inconsistent with themselves, 
with each other, and with the legends of surrounding 
nations. The legend of Adam and Eve makes all man- 
kind descend from Cain first and Seth afterwards, and yet 
says that Cain obtained his wife before Seth was born, and 
in a country whither he had fled from Adam and Eve, the 
only other human beings at that time on the earth. 
Then the descendants of Seth are made to live, each one, 
a thousand years, and when the earth was peopled, partly 
by a crossing of the human stock with angelic blood, the 
work of the Creator was entirely spoilt, and had to be 
begun again ; the Antediluvians were all destroyed ; and 
Noah and his family became in their turn the sole progeni- 
tors of all our present races. As one of Adam's three 
sons was murdered by his brother, so one of Noah's three 
sons was cursed by his father, and his descendants handed 
over into bondage to the descendants of the other two. 
Of this most orthodox adventure a most diabolical handle 
has been made to justify the enslavement of the black 
race by the white. This hotchpotch of old Hebrew legends, 
made sacred to our hearts by lectures from the pulpit and 
recitations at the mother's knee — this tissue of absurdity, 
called the biblical history of the origin of mankind, is ab- 
solutely the sole and entire argument for not considering* 
the human jraces as much distinct in kind and origin as are 
the llama and alpaca, or the vicuna and alpaca, or the 
springbok and the goat, or the hare and the rabbit, or the 
American bison and the European cow, or the wolf and 

when exercised, is conscious of its own excesses, a sentiment very proble- 
matical among the blacks. Yet they find reasons for leaving this occupied 
existence without a murmur — for honour, first, which under slightly va- 
rious names has occupied an enormous place in their ideas since the be- 
ginning of the race. Honour and its fruit, civilization, are not known to 
the yellow and black races. But this intellectual superiority is matched 
by an inferiority in their sensations. The white race is far more poorly 
endowed in sensual faculties than the other two. It is, therefore, less 
solicited and absorbed by corporal action, although its structure is 
remarkably more vigorous. (Martins says the European surpasses the 
black in the intensity of the nerve fluid. Rei&e in Brazilien, i. 259.) 

Here Gobineau has his tertiary and quaternary mixtures of these three 
grand secondary types. 



118 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 

the dog, or the dog and the jackal, or the camel and the 
dromedary; for all these acknowledged species not only 
breed together, but produce, under certain conditions, 
fertile offspring.* 

The Swiss naturalists thought that they had established 
four well-defined types of Helvetic skulls : the Sion type, 
rather long, and low in the crown ; the Hohberg type, with 
a pent-roof shape; the Dissentis type, bullet-headed, or 
square as it is usually called ; and the Belle-air type, of so 
mixed a character that ifc was soon discarded. The other 
three are still under discussion. The Sion type is identi- 
fied by the German naturalists as that of the Hiigel-graber, 
or grave-mounds of the valley of the Rhine ; and the Hoh- 
berg type (once supposed to be Roman) with that of the 
Reihen-graber skulls. The Sion type is common in the 
caverns of Belgium and elsewhere. But in the caves of the 
south of France appears another type, a small round head, 
like that of the Laplander's ; and this is the head associated 
with the rein- deer and other animals of that remote epoch. 
Pruner Bey. therefore, in the congress of 1867, at Paris, 
insisted strenuously upon the necessity for recognizing 
this small round head as the earliest type of man known 
to us. But Professor Vogt objected that the round form 
is theoretically the most perfect of all forms, giving most 
weight and least superficial exposure ; but he especially 
recalled to view the fact never to be forgotten, that the 
low Neanderthal skull (with others of a similar but not so 
excessively degraded a form) is equally ancient, and of a 
wholly opposite type. If the Hyperborean race followed 
(or led) the rein-deer to the south during the coming on 
of the glacial period, there must have been some other race 
also already in the field, to meet, and perhaps to disappear 
for a time before it, and then perhaps to reappear, after the 
worlds of ice had melted, and the Arctic zone had retreated 
within its polar circle. The encomiums lavished on the 
Engis skull are not only a little extravagant (for although 
it is finely shaped, it is not large), but its exact age also 
has never been satisfactorily determined. If, however, it 
be both very ancient and also Caucasian, then it establishes 
a third, superior, ancient race ; or, much more probably, 

* Vogt, vol. ii. 216. The only case of sterility, well authenticated, is 
that of the mule proper, the offspring of the horse and ass. 



V.] OF MANKIND. 119 

it merely proclaims the eternal possibility of individual 
greatness even in the worst of times. 

I account it probable, then, that the races of mankind 
have always been distinct ; and that they probably made 
their appearance on the planet successively ; perhaps the 
black and meagre races first and the white races last. It 
would not be strange also to find their history running pa- 
rallel with that of the apes and monkeys. For it is not to 
be denied that in the three types of manlike ape, viz. the 
orang, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla, the three principal 
divisions of the family of apes have found their last and 
highest development. Whether we split up the orangs 
and the gorillas into separate species, or only recognize 
in them varieties like those which separate the affiliated 
races of mankind, it is certain that each of the three man- 
like ape-forms presents its own characteristic manlike 
feature. The chimpanzee approaches man more closely in 
the form of the skull and in the character of its teeth. 
The orang approximates the human ideal especially in the 
construction of its brain. The gorilla resembles man rather 
in the make of his extremities. Neither one of the fhree 
can be said to stand absolutely nearer to man than the 
other two. All three strive to reach the human ideal, but 
on different sides of the common development. The orang, 
says Gratiolet, stands at the head of the family of gibbons 
and babboons, on account of the size of its forehead, the 
relative smallness of its backhead, and the development of 
its upper lobes : in other words, it has a better developed 
gibbon brain. The chimpanzee shows unmistakable anal- 
ogies of brain, skull, and face, with the makaken, and 
especially with the magot, and stands in the same well- 
developed relation to the makakos and pavians that the 
orang does to the gibbons and babboons. The gorilla is a 
mandrill by force of similar analogies, by its lack of tail, 
its breadth of breast-bone, its singularity of gait, walking 
upon the back or outer side of its two last finger-joints. 
There has been, then, an unmistakable, threefold, and 
parallel development of the ape ideal, along three historic 
lines from three original family groups.* I do not myself 
see what forbids us from supposing that the process of 

* See Schroder van der Kolk and Vrolik's fivefold resemblance in Vogt, 
ii. 283. 



120 ON THE UNITY [LECT. 

development went on to the production of those human 
forms of an acknowledged want of beauty and spirituality , 
of an acknowledged ape-like appearance, which we find 
populating the very regions of the chimpanzee, gorilla, 
and orang, viz. the brutal black races of tropical Africa, 
and the negritoes of Anderman and New Holland. 

The objection, I know, is at hand, that there are no in- 
termediate forms existing between those man-like apes 
and these ape-like men. But I think the force of this ob- 
jection is broken by several considerations. And first, by 
the consideration that such intermediate forms need not, 
for the sake of the argument, exist in masses or tribes. 
Individuals scattered all over the world, through all the 
human races, with low foreheads, small brains, long arms, 
thin legs, projecting, tusk-like teeth, suppressed noses, 
and other marks of arrested development ; to say nothing 
of millions of idiots and cretins produced by the same 
arrest in every generation of mankind, sustain the argu- 
ment. 

Then, secondly, we must consider that such intermediate 
forms may have existed in immense numbers and then 
disappeared, for all we know to the contrary. Nay, mul- 
titudes of them may exist in the fossil state, still undis- 
covered. Vogt has well observed that 20 years ago 
not a single fossil ape had been made out. During these 
20 years nearly a dozen have been found. One year ago 
no intermediate form between the schlankaffen and maka- 
ken was known ; now we have the whole skeleton of one.* 
Such intermediate types are continually turning up. 

And, thirdly, we must keep in mind most carefully that 
skulls have been found in caves, which would have been 
undoubtedly assigned to apes, had not other parts of the 
skeleton been found at the same time, compelling the 
anatomist to assign them to some ancient form of humanity ; 
precisely as, in the instance of the fossil ape discovered in 
Greece, by its skull it would have been pronounced a pure 
babboon, had not its limbs been those belonging to a 
species of makaken. 

And, fourthly, when we compare the cave and lake and 
diluvial skulls, as yet discovered, with the skulls of the Aus- 
tralian natives (accepted as the most degraded or apelike 
* Vogt, ii. 279! 



V.] OF MANKIND. 121 

race now living on the earth), the resemblance in most 
cases (setting the Engis skull aside) is so extraordinary, 
that we may be reasonably excused for suspecting that the 
early races of mankind were farther removed in the order 
of development from the noblest races now existing, than 
the apes are removed from them.* 

Let us praise God for our place in this procession of 
mysteries. If natural history should hereafter teach the 
truth of our descent from these inferior beings, Christianity 
will always teach humility. Let us comfort our pride by 
remembering, that everything has been good and perfect 
in its day and generation. 

* For more recent discussions of this subject, a propos of the two re- 
markable human jaw-bones found by Mr Dupont at Dinant, see Appendix. 



122 



LECTURE VI. 

ON THE EARLY SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 

The tree is known by its fruit. We have been con- 
sidering man as a being ; henceforth we are to regard him 
as a worker : first, as a social being, a worker in brass and 
iron, a maker of boats and bridges, an inventor of weapons, 
and a framer of laws ; then, as an intellectual being, a 
poet, or maker par excellence; an artist, a philosopher, a 
priest. 

It is not as easy to distinguish races by degrees of facial 
angle as by grades of civilization. Perhaps we have a 
right to say : as only some races of animals are tamable, so 
only certain races of mankind are civilizable. As the car- 
nivora love blood, and the ruminants and pachyderms love 
foliage and grass, so do some races of mankind love tents 
and waggons, while others prefer cities and ships. But 
after all our efforts to include these social tendencies 
among the anatomical or physiological characteristics of 
mankind, they recoil upon us as mere harmonies of man 
with nature. So long as large areas of the earth's surface 
consist of desert sands or grassy plains, so long will there 
be nomade races to inhabit them; mountains will breed 
mountaineers ; deltas grow cities. The fishing races do not 
seek the seashore, they are produced by it. The forest 
gives birth to the hunter, as it does to the deer and wild- 
boar after which he stalks. 

If this be so, and if forests have disappeared from civil- 
ized lands by the agency of man, it follows, that, when 
the earliest races of mankind appeared, they appeared in 
the form of fishing and hunting savages, the form most in 
harmony with the physical condition of the greater part 
of the earth's surface at that time. There were, no doubt, 
then as now, natural paradises existing here and there 



ON THE EAELY SOCIAL LIFE OP MAN. 123 

wherein some section of a single race would take- on a 
quicker civilization than elsewhere. But he must be blind 
who cannot detect the traces of that long, hard, desperate, 
bloody, cruel, demon-like conflict between the earliest 
men and all the adverse powers of the air and earth, — a 
conflict in which all the advantage was on nature's side, — 
but the victory on man's, because the genii of mind came 
to his relief. 

All civilization comes of work. The race that will not 
work cannot get civilized. Yet mere work is not a civil- 
izer. Leisure is indispensable. The French- Canadian 
works from four in the morning until six and seven at 
night, but his civilization is not high. Civilization is like 
navigation. It makes all the difference in the world 
whether there be a current with you, or a current against 
you. In the tropics and at the poles the powers of nature 
are too many for man. If he barely sleep he will do well. 
So also in the early ages, even in the temperate zone, man- 
kind needed reinforcement. The black race, which can- 
not advance under the equator any more than can the 
pigmy race around the pole, civilizes itself when it is 
transferred to the 40th parallel of latitude, provided there 
be given to it a chance to work. The progress of the 
black race in the United States, under all its disadvantages, 
has been respectable. Give it the freedom of the plough, 
the anvil, and the loom, that is, the right to enjoy the 
results of varied and honest labour, and you will give it 
the enjoyment of so much leisure afterwards as the high- 
est civilization needs. 

No race has ever yet consented to work for nothing 
cheerfully. All the sense of justice man has comes from 
resistance to that attempt. If the reconstruction of South- 
ern society is to be a success, it can be so only on condi- 
tion that the white man share the soil, the shop, the 
schoolroom, and the forum with the black. That the 
black race is willing to buy civilization at its natural 
price, that is, with work, has been demonstrated. But to 
show you how delicate a test of justice work can be, I will 
tell you a story, which a friend of mine, an engineer upon 
a Southern railroad, told to me. 

A railroad was projected through the swamp -lands of 
Florida. Slaves were hired from the planters of Georgia 



124 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 

to do the work. A day's task for every man was measured 
with a ten-foot pole. The slaves rose early and by work- 
ing diligently could complete their tale of work by two or 
three o'clock, and have the rest of the day for their amuse- 
ment. They soon discovered this advantage, and threw 
their whole soul into the business. Before noon nothing 
was to be seen but the flying dirt ; afternoon nothing but 
song and dance and general cheer. This was too good to 
last. The avaricious contractors made new poles, 1 3 inches 
instead of 12 to the foot. The day's task was unaccount- 
ably lengthened by an hour or more. The blacks could 
offer no explanation, and made no resistance, for the 
work was still within the range of cheerful diligence. 
Another month passed by and a third set of poles were 
distributed. The foot had now become 14 inches long, 
and the day's task lasted until sunset.* The defrauded 
labourers, seeing that there was no use struggling with an 
unjust despotism, returned to plantation-habits, shirked 
all the work they could, lost heart, and fell back into that 
barbarism, the essence of which consists in giving up the 
soul a prey to the forces of nature. The contractors had 
overshot their mark ; and so one of these monuments of the 
high civilization of the nineteenth century served only to 
remind the spectator of the aboriginal condition of the 
races of mankind before they had learned to hope to better 
their miserable plight. 

Rain, hail, and snow, and the furious, piercing north 
wind were the slave-drivers of that age. The perpetual 
growth of the forest, and the rapid increase of wild ani- 
mals, were the measuring-rods which mysteriously length- 
ened out their task. No wonder that despondency grew 
out of ignorance, and barbarity out of despair. It is hard 
to comprehend the possible beginnings of civilization in a 
wilderness of forests and mountains, pelted with storms, 
and horrible with the cries of wild beasts. Yet such was 

* The difference in the tasks, it should be remembered, is to be estimated 
in cubic measure. 

in. cub. in. 

One cubic foot 12 x 12 x 12 = 1728 
„ „ measure 13 x 13 X 13 = 2197, nearly 28 per cent. more 

than a true cubic foot. 
One cubic measure 14 X 14 X 14 — 2794, nearly 60 per cent, more 

than a true cubic foot. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 125 

Europe down to a recent date, i. e. to within a few centu- 
ries of the Christian era. Such was all North America 
two hundred years ago, with the exception of a few river 
bottoms, a few glades, and a few estuary marshes on the 
seacoast. In Europe also such places early became refuges 
and nurseries for man. It is therefore in the open plain 
of Languedoc, on the borders of the delta of the Rhone, 
and on the great chalk basin of central and northern 
France and southern England that relics of the most 
ancient races have been chiefly found. But even here 
they are commingled with the remains of tigers and 
hyenas, wild boars and bulls, the bear, the wolf, and the 
deer, and even of the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and 
the elephant, in such numbers and of such a size as to tell 
a plain story of the most savage existence. When we re- 
member that the only weapons which the men of the cave 
had at their command were fire, and the bow and arrow, the 
flint hatchet, fastened to its wooden handle with a willow- 
withe or a shrunken piece of deer- skin, or the pike pointed 
with a reindeer prong, or a wild boar's tusk ; and that the 
only farming implement they knew of was a paddle of 
flint, chipped thin and broad and worked by hand without 
a handle, our wonder grows how civilization could have 
found a time and starting-point. 

It was, no doubt, in order to avoid their natural 
enemies, the wild beasts, and perhaps also to defend 
themselves against each other, that some tribes, whose 
hunting-grounds lay neighbouring to lakes, betook them- 
selves to a peculiar mode of life. They planted upright 
logs in the . lake bottom, supporting them with heaps of 
stones, and lashing them together with wicker-work. On 
these they laid a wooden platform, communicating with 
the shore by a wooden bridge or causeway. On this 
platform stood their wigwams. Here the women aud 
children were comparatively safe when the men were on 
shore hunting, or farming, or at war. On the edges of the 
platform they sat to fish. In the centre of each wigwam 
perhaps was a layer of earth to cook their fish upon. 
Trap-doors in the village floor received the offal, the bones 
of animals after the marrow had been extracted, fragments 
of broken pottery, the waste of spoiled nets, and ruined 
weapons. Hundreds of the sites of these villages have 



126 ON THE EAELY [LECT. 

been recently discovered* in the lakes of Switzerland, 
Bavaria, and Austria, and thousands of such relics of their 
domestic life, but as yet only two skulls. t It is, therefore, 
certain, that these people were not habitual cannibals ; for 
in that case human skeletons would be abundant. It is 
equally evident that they either burned their dead, or 
buried them on shore. That both these customs were pur- 
sued at different times we have good evidence. It is 
remarkable that the oldest skull yet found in these lake- 
dwellings presents us again with all the low-type features 
of the Neanderthal cranium; great ridges over the orbits 
of the eyes, a suddenly retreating forehead, and extremely 
small capacity. It contained what seems an undeveloped 
brain ; but yet it could not have been (as some were in- 
clined to consider the Neanderthal cranium) the skull of an 
idiot. These people were far from being idiots. They 
were only animals. The essential difference between an 
idiot and an animal consists in this fact : the idiot, like 
the unborn foetus, is not aware of his relations to sur- 
rounding nature; his life goes on chemically, not con- 
sciously ; the animal, on the contrary, is wide-awake to his 
position and its demands. Indeed, the quickness and 
many-sidedness of this self-consciousness is the nicest scale 
we have by which to grade the animal creation. Behold 
the deer, for instance; how alive to every sound and 
motion ! how skilful to hide ! how prompt to fly ! And 
yet I have myself stood for half an hour, by my transit 
instrument, in the woods of the Towanda Mountains, wait- 
ing until my men cut out a line down the long steep slope 
into a valley ; and during all this time I have seen a deer 
stand motionless, watching the brilliant spot of light which 
the sunbeams through the trees made on the brass cylinder 
of my telescope, not fifty paces distant, unaware of my 
presence, and unconscious of danger. In vain, says the 
poet of old, is the net spread in the sight of any bird. 
The consciousness of its relations is not complete in any 

* Beginning with the dry winter of 1853-4, Meilen, on Lake Zurich. 

f One (mentioned in Rutimeyer's Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten in der 
Schweitz, p. 181. Basel, 1861), at Meilen, on Lake Zurich, early stone 
period, called by Prof. His an intermediate type between the long and 
short-headed forms ; and, therefore, not like the small round heads of the 
Danish peat-mosses ; the other found by Desor, 1864, and referred to in 
the text. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. . 127 

animal; but it is more complete in some than in' others. 
The horse is superior to the deer ; yet the horse rushes 
into, not out of a burning stable. The ape is superior to 
all animals below man, because his powers of observation 
have more scope, his comprehension of emergencies is 
more logical; he shows an inventive genius harmonizing 
with this higher degree of self-consciousness, and hence 
he more perfectly imitates the brutal customs, the virtues, 
and the vices of mankind. The difference between the ape 
and the civilized man lies in the limitation of the conscious- 
ness of the ape to his physical and passional relationships 
to nature ; while the self-consciousness of the civilized 
man deals also with the subjects of abstract thought, and 
with the invisible and eternal worlds.* But this is the 
precise distinction between the cave or lake-dwellers of 
early Europe, and the Londoner or Bostonian of to-day; 
and thus we are returned once more to the idea of the 
affiliation of the apes with mankind in the early stages of 
its existence. 

That these old lake-dwellers were in no respects idiotic 
is evident from the very nature of the case : a race of 
idiots could no more continue to exist than unborn chil- 
dren could. But their handicraft is still more conclusive 
evidence. In the museum of M. Troy on of Lausanne I 
had the pleasure of examining a piece of a door, half- 
burned, consisting of three boards, two of which lay side 
by side, but not rabbited together ; the third board crossed 
the other two at right angles, to hold them together ; but 
instead of being nailed or pegged fast to them, it was as 
regularly dovetailed into them as a carpenter of our days 
would have done it. I saw also among these curious 
objects pieces of twisted thread and knotted net. Their 
clothes were probably of skins, and loom-weaving was as 
yet unknown, but specimens of plaited cloth have been 
found. I saw needles of bone to sew with ; and pieces of 
charred baked bread in the form of flat round cakes ; and 
grains of wheat and barley. The small wild apple and 
pear of the Swiss woods have also been dredged up, wild 
plum-stones, and beech and hazel-nuts in great abund- 
ance. 

* I will return to this subject in the beginning of the Tenth Lecture. 



128 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 

How pleasant it would be to have a dinner- scene of 
those days by Teniers, or a page of table-talk by Cole- 
ridge ! What a contrast would it present to the Round 
Table of Arthur and his paladins ! or to a dejewier at 
the Maison Dore'in 1865 ! The table can be seen, with its 
dish, in the Museum of the Irish Academy ; but where are 
the guests ? It was discovered in a peat-bog, in County 
Tyrone, ten feet beneath the surface. The table and the 
dish were each scooped out of a solid piece of wood, 
apparently fir. An oblong table, with its ends curved in- 
ward, and set on four short legs, four and a half inches 
high, truncated cones, connected at their bases by a low 
rim, in which are two cord holes ; and an oval dish four or 
five inches deep, in its edge two holes answering to the 
two holes in the rim of the table, and probably slung to it 
on the back in travelling. Beside the dish lay a large heap 
of hazel-nuts, probably an autumnal hoard just gathered 
for winter's use. Perhaps they were uproariously enjoy- 
ing their repast, when interrupted by the rush of some 
carnivorous beast, scattering their merriment.* 

How long the ages were during which these lake- dwell- 
ings were inhabited we do not know. We know that they 
existed still in the days of Herodotus ; and the Swiss 
antiquaries believe that those of Neville and Chavannes 
in the Canton de Yaud continued to be dwelt on to the 
YIth century after Christ. There are sufficient evidences 
in the articles found to distinguish them as of very differ- 
ent ages. The iron age of the Romans is represented ; 
the preceding age of bronze ; and a still more ancient age 
of stone, perhaps going back to the times succeeding the 
retreat of the Swiss glaciers. We cannot tell, therefore, 
at what time wild apples, plums, and berries were ex- 
changed for wheat and barley bread ; nor when the skins 
of beasts were replaced by plaited cloth. The best scale 
of years we have is got from Rutimeyer's list of the 
animals on which these ancients fed, and especially by the 
marked change from wild to domestic flesh. In all of the 
lake-dwelling deposits, even the oldest, we find the bones 
of the domesticated ox, sheep, goat, and dog; and inter- 
mixed with these in various localities, bones of the horse 
and ass, bones of the elk and stag, the roe and fallow-deer, 

* O'Callighan. Proc. Geol. and P. S., W. R. Yorkshire, p. 315,1863-4. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. -. 129 

the ibex and the chamois, the bison and wild bull, the 
small swamp -hog and the great wild boar, the wolf and 
fox, the bear and the badger, the marten, polecat, ermine, 
and weasel, the otter and the beaver, the hedgehog, 
squirrel, and fieldmouse, the wildcat and the hare, the 
frog and the tortoise, the wild swan, goose, two kinds of 
ducks, and fifteen other kinds of birds. All that contained 
marrow are found split open : this is invariably the case 
with those of the bull and bison. In the most ancient 
villages, like those of Wangen and Moosseedorf, the 
greater predominance of bones of the wild stag and roe, 
over those of tame cattle, show a decided preference of the 
chase to a more civilized mode of life ; the tame pig is 
wanting, goats outnumber sheep, the fox was an habitual 
dish. 

When the bronze age opened, the Lithuanian aurochs or 
bison (bos bison, bos priscus) ceased to be eaten,* and the 
savages began to tame the great wild bull (bos urus, or 
primogenius), which Cassar describes as still existing in his 
day, fierce, swift, and strong, and scarcely inferior to the 
elephant in size ; in its tamed state its bones became some- 
what less massive and heavy, and its horns somewhat 
smaller. At this time they added to the common dog, which 
seems to have been their companion from the beginning^ a 
new large hunting dog ; and with it a small horse, which 
however must have been very rare among them. By this 
time the elk and beaver had become extirpated ; and the 
fox had ceased to be a fashionable article of diet. 

In looking over this list it seems very remarkable that 
two animals are absent from it, which we should have sup- 
posed almost the very first to be discovered. Of the hare 
only one single fragment of a bone has as yet been found ; 
and we can only explain its absence by Caesar's account 
of the holy horror with which the Britons of his day re- 
garded it, and with which the Laplanders, who represent 
the ancient hyperborean race in Europe, still regard it. Of 
the domestic cat also there is not a trace, until we come 
down to the very youngest villages, those' assigned to the 
Vlth century. J And this, again, is in curious harmony with 

* Protected by Czars in one Lithuanian forest, to the present day. 

f The oldest of man's gods, the Anubis of Egypt. 

J Lyell, Ant. of Man, p. 26. Desor's Palahttes. Smithson, Cont. 1866. 



130 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 

the fact, that no trace of the cat exists on the most ancient 
monuments of Egypt.* 

The absence of the reindeer, on the other hand, is merely 
an evidence of the far inferior antiquity of these lake- 
dwellings to those remains of man which have been found 
in the caves of France. 

I have said enough to give you a picture of long middle 
stages in the primeval history of European humanity in 
Switzerland. But it is necessary to say a few more words 
about its phases farther north. Let us look for a moment 
at a more inhospitable region. Let me ask you to keep in 
mind, that in every age, no matter how far back we go, we 
find men living everywhere ; living under different circum- 
stances, but living everywhere. I shall say something in 
due time about migrations. But I wish you to observe 
just now, that theories of migration are the most unsatis- 
factory products of science. In days preceding the oldest 
migrations, of which we can obtain any glimpse, the entire 
surface of the earth seems to have been just as completely 
settled as it is to-day. In the Stone age, while the 
Helvetian aborigines were platting cloth and cooking 
domestic cattle on elaborately constructed platforms in the 
lake-waters of the south, a race of utter savages were 
sitting around fires, on the shores of the Baltic ; with not 
a single domesticated animal to call their own, except the 
dog, and that a smaller species ; gnawing the flesh and 
splitting the marrow-bones of wild bulls, now extinct, of 
foxes, wolves, and lynxes, red-deer and roes -, beavers long 
since extinct, and seals now very rare; with penguins and 
capercailzies, both now extinct in Scandinavia. But I am 
wrong to call them utter savages, for they had already 
learned the art of boat-building, f and were bold fishermen, 
as we can see by the bones of herring, cod, and flounders, 
which are found among the mounds of kitchen tra3h which 
line the shores and mark their haunts. But they were not 

* Mariette's Researches. Kenan's article in the Revue des Deux 
Mondes, April, 1865. 

f Rude canoes scooped from trunks are often found in British peat- 
bogs, sometimes with their short clumsy paddles, and in rare instances, a 
rope of moss or heather, attached to a stone close by, showing the primi- 
tive mode of anchorage. A very perfect specimen lately discovered in the 
valley of the Aire, is in the museum at Leeds. But such canoes are of 
all ages. (O'Callighan, Proc. Geol. Pol. S. W. R. York. 18634, p. 314. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 131 

cannibals. No human bones make these heaps horrible. 
In spite of the over-confident assertion of Mr John Craw- 
ford, who said in a recent debate upon the carnivorous 
Esquimaux, that so far as his researches went, they were 
the only exception to the fact that the ancestors of every 
race of man had been at one time or another cannibals. 
The occasional eating of human flesh by shipwrecked 
mariners does not make a British nation a race of canni- 
bals.* Skulls have been disinterred from peat-bogs and 
from graves believed to be of the same period, — which 
skulls are small and round, with massive bones above the 
eyes, resembling those of the pigmy race of modern Lap- 
landers. The skulls of the bronze and iron ages found in 
the upper layers of the Danish peat-bogs are both longer 
and larger, and belonged no doubt to a race that invaded 
the Baltic regions afterwards. 

We have the means at hand for reconstructing in imagin- 
ation the three different conditions of those northern 
lands during their inhabitation by three successive races. 
Taking the last first, — in Eoman times the Danish isles 
were covered with a magnificent forest of beech, whi'ch still 
exists. This is the tree of the iron age. Its logs are 
abundant in the topmost layers of those peat-bogs which 
are so numerous in the north, and in which the skeletons 
of lost men, with large long skulls, are sometimes found, 
with iron arms and implements. Beneath these top layers 
lie others deeper down, but how much older we know not, 
the logs in which are all of oak. Oak was the forest of the 
age of bronze. In the peat-layers no iron is found, and 
very few skeletons; because the people of that age burned 
their dead, and buried their ashes in urns, beneath grave 
mounds. How many thousands of years this age of oak 
woods and funereal fires stretched backward we know not. 
But behind it lie the vaster ages of the stone period. The 
lowest layers of peat contain neither logs of beech nor logs 
of oak; their embedded trunks are chiefly of Scotch fir. 

* Proc. 11. Geog. Soc, Jan. 23, 1805. Kane and others have testified 
to the improvidence of the Esquimaux, and to their actually starving in 
midwinter when calm weather and the neap-tides permit the sea to freeze 
over, and the walrus have to seek water in the offing. In 1854-5 they 
were compelled to eat their dogs, but not a case of cannibalism is known 
to have occurred among them. — But see facts stated in Lecture X. 



132 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 

The savages of those remote times lived in the true Cim- 
merian darkness of the pines ; and their relics are the long 
heaps of oyster-shells, cockles, and other edible molluscs, 
plentifully mixed in with the remains of quadrupeds, birds, 
and fish, the catalogue of which I have already given you. 
Scattered throughout these heaps are found flint knives 
and instruments of bone and horn, coarse potsherds, char- 
coal and cinders, but not a trace of either iron or bronze. 
Yet the polish given to the stone knives and hatchets show 
that even this ancient age is not so infinitely remote from 
ours, either in time or in barbarism, as that of the people 
of the diluvium and earlier caves, to say nothing of possible 
relics in the tertiary deposits.* 

See how all civilization is relative. As we look down 
these slopes of a foregone eternity, deeps yawn in deeps, in 
each a deeper still. 

See also on what delicate threads of evidence such demon- 
strations hang. A single herring-bone in a hundred acres 
of oyster- shells, — a single file-scratch on a golden torque, 
found in a Druid barrow, tells the whole story. It is the 
master-trick of genuine science ; Agassiz constructing the 
whole fish from a single scale ; Leverrier detecting the 
skulking Neptune by a ripple in the orbit of Uranus. But, 
as I have said already, the method must be sound, the 
starting-point well known, or the result will be a He. 
What I have given you this evening are the well-estab- 
lished and universally accepted results of many years of 
careful investigation, by all the archaeologists of northern 
Europe, led by such masters as Worsae, Nilsson, Steenstrup 
and Thompson, Wilson and Lubbock,f and Busk, and with 
all the resources of geology at their command. Hundreds 

* The oyster is no longer to be found in the Baltic shores ; and the 
periwinkle' (cardium edule) which still grows there is a variety dwarfed by 
the brackishness of the Baltic water since the ocean was shut out from it, 
by the gradual rise of the Scandinavian peninsula, at the observed rate of 
two or three inches in a century. The absence from these kitchen heaps 
of the mammoth and rhinoceros is not so extraordinary as is that of the 
aurochs and reindeer, for the first two may have become extinct at an ear- 
lier period in this latitude. 

f See Morlot's Mem, in Bull Soc. Yaud, vi. 1860, Lausanne ; trans- 
lated in 8th contrib. Smith. Inst., Washington, and abstracted by Lyeli 
in Ant. Man, p. 8. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OP MAN". -. 133 

of peat-bogs liave been searched, thousands of turiiuli have 
been opened, miles of shell-heaps have been explored, and 
that beneath the jealous criticism of all Europe. In the 
sober judgment of well-informed men this much may be 
considered settled : that a general advance in civilization 
is perceptible in the past history of man during what may 
be roughly stated as the stone, the bronze, and the iron 
periods, or, if you prefer to call them so, the ages of the 
pine, the oak, and the beech woods ; that the men of the 
stone age were savage hunters and fishermen, of small 
stature and low intellect ; that the men of the bronze age 
came in from other lands, bringing with them the know- 
ledge of metallurgy, a taste for beauty, and religious feel- 
ings which led them to burn their dead ; and that the men 
of the iron age were of still another race and country, 
large of stature, long-headed, warriors, with iron swords, 
and iron ploughs, builders of forts and ships, restless in- 
vaders, fond of state, accumulators of property, oppressors 
of the ancient peoples, and the natural progenitors of the 
Berseckers and Jarl kings who, in the years of written 
history, conquered the west and south of Europe, and laid 
the basis broad for the eminent civilization of our modern 
times.* 

Will any one be so far influenced by the prejudices of 
scholastic education as to insist on a reversal of this order 
of civil development ? Will any one maintain that man- 
kind, although at first created, in some Eden, a little lower 
than the angels, full of strength and beauty and endowed 
with supernatural intelligence, lords of the fowl and the 
brute, tilling the soil and adorning their homes with beau- 
tiful works of art, were nevertheless compelled by wrath 
divine against a mythical sin, to wander out towards the in- 
hospitable north, fell into want and misery and lost their high 
prerogatives, abandoned their generous habits, forgot their 
faculties, grew savage, and became at last the wretched 
outcasts whose remains are mingled with the bones of ex- 
tinct beasts and fishes of the sea on the Scandinavian 
shores ? Let such a one remember that so far as our 
knowledge of history goes, so far as all the facts have been 

* Nat. Hist. Review, 1861, &c. And two volumes published 1865, 
'Prehistoric Times.' Williams and Norgate, Lond. 2 Vols. See 'West- 
minster lie view/ July, p. 126. 



134 ON THE EAELY [LECT. 

collected, no single instances of such a degradation can be 
cited in support of such a theory. Men, so far as we know, 
have always increased their stock of knowledge and power, 
instead of losing it. The law of invasion has been a law 
of development. Races have always elevated and ennobled 
each other. Their wanderings have been like the steps of 
a conflagration, the farther it goes the fiercer it burns. 
The Persian love of flowers becomes a national mania 
when transplanted to the icy banks of the Neva. The 
smelting of copper once discovered in Armenia, could no 
more be forgotten in Sweden and Norway, than the love 
of Christ can become extinct in California. A race may 
die out, but not its ideas ; except by giving place to truer 
truths and lovelier lovelinesses. Civilizations, to be edu- 
cated, may be forced to make the tour of the world ; but 
they are not rolling stones that gather no moss. The 
mariner' s needle of the distant east may have to wait a 
thousand years before it finds a box and dial-plate in Italy; 
but sooner or later it will be rectified for iron ships upon 
the Atlantic. It maybe the year of our Lord 1862, before 
Blake and Pompelly shall teach the miners of Japan how 
to make a blast with their own gunpowder ; but do you 
suppose those islanders will ever, to the end of time, allow 
that splendid trick to be again forgotten ? Has not the 
whole movement of the human race been from the poles 
towards the equator ? From ice and darkness and misery, 
towards the sunlight and the grape ? Have we a single 
fact to show that the movement was ever in the other 
direction ? Science cannot resign to a theological con- 
jecture. Until incontrovertible facts are offered as an 
argument against it we must continue, in our reasonings, 
to follow the course of nature as we know it, and say that 
barbarism everywhere on earth preceded civilization ; and 
accept the order of the Danish peat-bogs as the symbol of 
the order of the aboriginal development of the races of 
mankind. 

' As has been truly observed/ says Mr Lubbock in a 
speech before the R. Geographical Society,* ' man, in the 
earlier times of which we have any relics, appears to have 
been not only a savage, but a savage living under Arctic 

* Jan. 23, 1865, p. 61 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. . 135 

conditions/ Therefore the accounts which Kane, and Ross 
before him, have given us of the isolated race of Esquimaux, 
living on the west coast of Greenland, between the two 
great prongs of the Humboldt glacier, and so completely- 
cut off from the rest of the world that they would not be- 
lieve Ross when he said he had come to them from the 
south — are of surpassing interest to us. These Arctic 
Highlanders contend with nature for a chance to live under 
the extremest disabilities. They have no boats, and there- 
fore cannot follow their food when it migrates. They have 
no fish-hooks, and therefore cannot live on fish. They have 
neither bow nor arrow, and therefore to them the herds of 
reindeer, which range unmolested on the barren uplands at 
the base of the great glaciers, the Sernik Soak, or great Ice- 
wall, as they call it, which hems them in, are valueless. l They 
have never been seen to partake of a single herb, or grass, 
or berry grown upon the shore,'' says Osborne,* i and of 
vegetables and sereals they have of course no conception/ 
No other people on earth are known to be so entirely carni- 
vorous. Kane calls them an expiring race ; but he furnishes 
for the support of this assertion no good evidence. As Ross 
found them in 1818, Kane saw them in 1854 ; only, they had 
become friendly instead of being hostile to their visitors. 
Without driftwood, except a fragment of wreck at rare in- 
tervals, and with only a small supply of meteoric iron, and 
a few wrecked iron hoops, they could make no weapons 
but bone knives, bone harpoons, and bone lances, with 
which they attack and kill white bears and seals and wal- 
ruses, with the help of dogs. With nets they catch in 
summer vast numbers of the delicious little auk or penguin. 
They have in use the identical form of skin-scrapiug tools 
which have been found so abundantly in the diluvial and 
cave deposits of Europe, flat on one side, convex on the 
other, round at one end, and pointed at the other. But 
as supplies of meat in such cold countries can be preserved 
for a long time, we may find in these carnivorous habits of 
the present Esquimaux a new and more satisfactory ex- 
planation of the vast numbers of animal- skeletons which 
are found in the old caves, if we suppose the ancient in- 
habitants of Europe to have been an Arctic and carnivorous 

* Jan. 23, 1865, p. 50. 



136 ON THE EAELT [lECT. 

race.* In spite of all the disadvantages of their situation, 
' all who have seen these people describe the men as square 
built, hearty fellows, deep-chested, bass-voiced, and merry- 
hearted ; and the women, good souls, as tender and sympa- 
thetic in their quaint way; for it's not every European mother 
who would lend a nice warm babe to make a soft pillow for a 
weary traveller, as the ladies of Etah did ; and fair enough 
to win the hearts of some on board of the Advance. 
Kane's faithful hunter Hans abandoned him for love of 
Shanghu's pretty daughter, who had nursed him when 
wounded in a walrus hunt. These people live as far north 
as 80°, and there are indications that Esquimaux settlements 
may even be found at the very pole.f 

In strong contrast with the well-authenticated, well-com- 
pacted, and in all respects sober mass of information which 
the northern antiquarians have put at our disposal, stand 
the isolated and ill-confirmed reports of tertiary men, such 
as those of the Abbe Bourgeois and M. Desnoyers ; and 
also the extraordinary theories of enthusiasts like MM. 
Brouillet and Meillet, based upon — mistakes. But when 
we remember the wild conjectures to which Phoenician 
letters on the Grave-mound amulet in western Virginia 
gave rise, and the numerous forgeries of Oriental human 
relics in our Western States, which have been reported from 
time to time, it is not unuseful to observe how such aber- 
rations may be possible even to the most advanced science 
of Europe. These gentlemen have lately published an ac- 
count of certain bone-caves in Poitou,J from which they 
have obtained animal remains, similar to those found in 

* Kane and others found that the Esquimaux kill the walrus rapidly 
in the spring, and heap their bodies on the shore, piling rocks over the 
heap, while they kill more ; but like all savages, they are so thoughtless 
that these caches putrify in the summer ; for they never seem to think of 
making them in the ice-caves of the adjacent glaciers. All this proves 
how tenacious human life is. Kane says that the Arctic winter temper- 
ature stood for three months at — 60° to 75° Fahrenheit. But human life 
is tenacious of the earth only where animal life is so ; the enormous walrus 
suckles its young in midwinter at 77° lat. ; so do the herds of seals feed- 
ing on fish. But the walrus seems to feed on sea-weed alone. At any 
rate the glacial period in Europe could no more extirpate the cave- dwell- 
ing race than the Arctic winters can the Esquimaux. (Proc. R. Geog. 
Soc, p. 65, Jan. 23, 1865.) 

t Reiterated by Mr C. R. Markham, Proc. Geog. Soc, Jan. 23, 1865. 

X See Westminster Review, July, 1865, p. 121. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. .. 137 

other caverns in France, scratched and marked by man. 
On some of them are Sanscrit letters, not so arranged, 
however, as to be pronounceable in words or syllables; 
and two of them are scratched upon a bone representing 
a phallus. From, these assumed Sanscrit letters they con- 
clude that the cave-people of France were emigrants from 
Asia ; that the written language of Arya was of enormous 
antiquity; that the probable date of the relics is 24,000 
years B.C. ; that at that time there occurred one of those 
periodical cataclysms which desolate the earth and drive 
the races to and fro ; that another, taking place about 
14,000 B.C., was the debacle produced by the breaking up 
of the antarctic polar ice; and that a third was brought 
about in 2350 B.C. by a similar breaking up of the ice- 
cope around the Arctic pole. 

Unfortunately for this fine theory, M. Pictet, of Geneva, 
pronounces that these letters, although actually Sanscrit, 
have been unskilfully selected from one of the more modern 
forms of that alphabet ! Setting aside, however, the stu- 
pidity of the forgery, the hypothesis, judged upon its own 
merits, melange as it is of scientific and unscientific ele- 
ments, can hardly hold together long enough for us to 
look at it. We might almost as well accept the Greek 
or Hebrew fables of a universal deluge; a phenomenon 
which we well know to be physically impossible ; for the 
most tremendous rain-fall does not exceed six inches per 
hour, and so completely desiccates the atmosphere, that it 
can last but a short time ; whereas, even if it continued in 
full force for forty days and nights, the entire amount 
would only be some 6000 inches, or 500 feet. If all the 
aqueous vapour in the atmosphere were to be condensed at 
once, it could not elevate the sea level by 50 feet. Nor is 
modern science aware of the existence of any 'fountains of 
the great deep ' to be broken up, to supplement the defi- 
ciency. And if, as some have been willing to suppose, the 
divine hand could have pressed down some one area of the 
crust of the earth, so as to permit the ocean to rush in and 
cover it, the only consequence of that would have been to 
drain off extensive areas elsewhere, and thus increase the 
amount of land left dry. 

When we introduce the idea of cataclysms, therefore, 
into ethnology, we must carefully limit their magnitude, 



138 ON THE EAELY [lECT. 

and define their causes, wholly irrespective of the fanciful 
or allegorical stories of the ancient poets ; rememberings 
moreover, how the ignorance of men predisposes them to 
enlarge and dignify their personal and local misadventures 
into universal disasters to the human race. 

Too great a cataclysm would extirpate nations, instead 
of transferring them from one domain to another. We 
must lessen the cause if we wish to produce the required 
effect. Had the melting of the Swiss glaciers been the 
sudden result of the instantaneous emergence of the Sahara 
desert and the immediate creation of the Sirocco winds, 
the aboriginal population of Europe would have been 
swept by a double deluge into the surrounding seas. But, 
as we know, the African portion of the ancient Mediter- 
ranean was cut off from the European portion of it so 
slowly, by the gradual accumulation of gravel bars between 
the Carthaginian and Cyrenian coasts ; and the drying up 
of the African waters must have been a process so de- 
liberate, and so apart from any noticeable change of level as 
to land and sea, that the melting of the glaciers may have 
occupied the lifetime of a generation of cave-dwellers, and 
produced no change of climate, nor of soil, to which they 
were not amply competent to adapt themselves. 

Truth needs a good perspective. A hill looks always 
steeper from its foot, or from its summit, than when we 
are upon its sides. So the foreshortening of time, re- 
garded with a backward glance, piles up the thousand 
minor incidents of some slow change into one mighty 
crisis, and we stand amazed and terrified at the possibility 
of the recurrence in our day, of what, were it really to 
happen, would no more trouble us than any of the ordi- 
nary common-place experiences of life. 

It is not a general deluge then, it is an ordinary inun- 
dation, which mankind has to fear. A freshet, as we call 
it, a famine, a pestilence, a murrain in their flocks and 
herds, the loss of timber by the conflagrations of a year of 
drought — these are real cataclysms of human history ; pro- 
ducing poverty and desperation, exciting insurrections 
against established governments, bursting into a blaze of 
civil war, and ending with the expulsion of the unfortunate 
to seek and settle upon other lands. When once the im- 
pulse is established in some distant and perhaps unheard- 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. ■ 139 

of portion of the population of the world, it propagates 
itself from tribe to tribe and from race to race, those be- 
hind precipitating themselves upon those in front, and those 
attacking having the usual advantage over those attacked, 
until a whole continent is ethnologically shifted forward 
one degree, while some pre-eminently vigorous stock may 
have even penetrated through half of the moving mass and 
planted itself in the very heart of an entirely alien race. 
Such was the case of the hyperborean Hungarians, now 
surrounded by Sclavonians ; and such was every way the 
case with the establishment of the Yandals in northern 
Africa, of the Saracens in Spain and southern France, of 
the Turkomans in Greece, and of the Hyksos in ancient 
Egypt, who probably crossed, like the Turks of modern 
days, the whole of central Asia, from the northern borders 
of the Chinese empire. 

We are too apt to regard political revolutions as the 
work of politicians. Far from it. Websters and Calhoun s 
are merely maggots in the fermenting cheese, bred of it, 
and feeding on it, but not much more than illustrations of 
its liveliness. We must find the causes of political revo- 
lutions in the masses of the people. Fat folks love ease 
and hate the clash of arms. The wolves of the Pyrenees 
descend into the villages not until they are gaunt-ribbed 
and hollow-eyed with famine. Throw multitudes out of 
employment, — it is like dipping a handful of cotton-wool 
into sulphuric acid ; you turn it into gun-cotton, and any 
spark will explode it, so as to tear your hand in pieces. 
Thus are governments destroyed. 

Look at any good chart of the region of China around 
the capital city of Pekin. You will notice there the course 
of the mightiest river in the world, the Yellow River, 
Hoang-ho, which drains the central parts of Asia. You 
will notice also a range of mountains (running north and 
south directly in its path to the gulf of Pechele), which one 
of our geologists, Mr Pompelly, believes to have been 
elevated at a recent date. Through this range the river 
once passed directly to the sea by what is now the bed of 
another river, the Pei-ho. But by a subsequent re-eleva- 
tion of this mountain- chain the great river, turned at a right 
angle southward, has been compelled to seek, along the west- 
ern foot of the ridge, its passage 850 miles farther south 



140 ON THE EAELT [LECT. 

than the gap through which it used to go before. Here it 
turns east, goes through, and takes its unobstructed way 
to the Yellow Sea. The country between the mountains 
and the sea is a low plain traversed by numerous ancient 
river-beds, a vast delta which the river has been slowly 
and steadily reclaiming from the ocean for no one knows 
how long. In old Chinese municipal records many of the 
ancient cities which now stand miles and even leagues 
back from the shore, are described as seaports, with good 
harbours, when they were first built. You will also notice 
a high mountainous promontory projecting from the middle 
of the delta into the sea ; this was an island once. The 
delta has been formed around its western end by the Yel- 
low River, changing its bed alternately to the right and to 
the left, with a motion precisely like that of the head of a 
silkworm when spinning its cocoon. At the last meeting 
of the National Academy at Northampton, Mr Pompelly 
exhibited a chart of this delta, constructed for him by a 
learned Chinese scholar, whom he employed to search the 
historical records of the province, so that he could lay 
down the different courses which the mighty stream had 
taken under the different dynasties of Chinese emperors, 
debouching alternately on the two sides of the central 
promontory. There is a Chinese story, that after a deluge, 
which destroyed mankind, the great king, Yu, first em- 
peror of the first dynasty, B.C. 2100, built dykes to confine 
the river to its then existing bed. This care of the Yellow 
River became the hereditary policy of all succeeding em- 
perors, a sine qua non for any dynasty, however powerful. 
For, as the river filled up its bed, until its surface level 
stood 50 and 60, and, as the Jesuits say, even 90 feet above 
the surrounding country, the least remissness threatened 
incredible calamities. The delta was exceedingly fertile ; 
its population was the densest in the world; its level 
surface could afford no shelter from destruction were the 
banks to break ; flight might save individuals, but in 
a state of utter destitution, for the highlands were a hun- 
dred miles away ; the flocks and herds would surely perish ; 
and the river, swollen for the occasion, would plough a 
broad, deep avenue of annihilation through the sites of 
towns and cities, to its new month upon the farther side 
of the peninsula. In the face of all these terrors, and they 



VI.] SOCIAL LIEE OF MAN. •• 141 

were no imaginations, for they had been repeatedly realized, 
the government officials would periodically grow careless 
and venal ; the misappropriation to themselves of taxes, 
levied to keep up the banks, allowed those banks to be- 
come slowly weaker at every point, until some winter of 
uncommon snow upon the mountains would be followed 
by a late spring of uncommon heat ; the river would sud- 
denly overtop its insufficient banks and spread destruction 
over the whole delta. The destruction of life alone, to this 
over-populated region, although appalling, would be rather 
a blessing than a curse. English ships have been known 
to steam up all the way from Whampoa to Canton through 
a sheet of dead bodies like drift ice, after such an inunda- 
tion of the Canton river. But the worst terrors of the 
event lay in the millions of unburied, putrifying corpses, 
covering the fields; the starving myriads, women and 
children; and the desperate ferocity of armed brigands, 
wifeless, and childless, and houseless, and landless, and 
moneyless, moving from the scene of wrath and woe out- 
ward in all directions, to spread disturbance through 
surrounding provinces. To suppress these armies of vaga- 
bonds armies of regulars and volunteers had to be em- 
ployed, which only increased the evils of the land. Con- 
tinual fighting turned the robbers into warriors, and the 
imbecility of the decaying dynasty which had been the 
original cause of failure in the river-dykes, became now 
the cause of its military overthrow. The records of China 
show that these changes in the course of the Yellow River, 
happening at regular intervals of three or four centuries, 
have corresponded with as many imperial revolutions. We 
need not doubt that some of these revolutions, commenc- 
ing at the Yellow Sea, have set in motion waves of war and 
wandering, which never stopped until they broke upon the 
Atlantic coast. 

But we are not to think that a millionth part of the 
water follows the wave. The form advances, but the equi- 
librium must be maintained. Persons, families, armies 
migrate ; but not the race. Were this not true we should 
see to-day the cat-eyed Mongol tethering his horse on the 
lands of western France. Hang up a row of ivory balls ; 
strike the first one ; what happens ? Do they all rush 
forward in a heap ? No, the last one only flies ; the rest 



142 ON THE EAELY [LECT. 

remain in place. Thus the races of mankind have, in the 
main, retained their original seats by virtue of an elasticity- 
inherent in all organized society, even of the lowest grade ; 
yet propagating tidal waves of agriculture, commerce, 
mechanics, arts, politics, and religion from east to west, 
fusing the different races practically into one. 

There are other, less striking, but more powerful, phy- 
sical causes of the out-wanderings of races; such as the 
change of fertile countries into deserts, or of salubrious 
into pestilential air. But the physical sciences have not 
yet made these causes indisputably clear, and history has 
not preserved sufficiently plain records to enable us to 
judge of the events. Two instances of such, however, 
may be cited as well worthy of consideration. 

There is a range of desert country stretching across the 
map of the old world, from the Atlantic shores of northern 
Africa, by Egypt and Arabia, Persia and Independent 
Tartary, to the Chinese Wall. Its drought, and conse- 
quent sterility, connect themselves with certain grand and 
constant currents of the atmosphere ; as also do those 
similar but more restricted deserts lying on each side of 
the Andes and the Rocky Mountains in America. 

But the removal of forests also has much to do with the 
production of desert lands ; for the forests modify the 
rain-fall. The Kalahari desert, in southern Africa, is gain- 
ing in extent, its rivers drying up, as Mr James F. Wilson 
says, because of the indiscriminate felling of timber by the 
natives and colonists combined ; the land once occupied by 
the frugal, thrifty Hottentots is now possessed by wasteful 
Caffres ; and iron axes are in everybody's hand, where 
formerly an iron axe was a great rarity. Thus even an 
improvement of the highest value in the arts may give oc- 
casion for a fatal wrong to a portion of mankind. 

Mr Cyril Graham has shown that the anciently populous 
region of Hauran, to the east of Damascus, full of the ruins 
of great cities, became the uninhabitable desert it now is 
from the same cause. Generals Humphreys and Abbot, 
of the United States army, have demonstrated, in the case 
of the Mississippi, what Sir Roderick Murchison asserts 
of the Volga, that its volume of water has diminished by 
the settling and clearing of the upper country. The 
French revolution let loose the axe in the Pyrenees., and 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 143 

the people were fast turning the south of France into a 
desert, when Napoleon restored the ancient law to protect 
the woods. Colonel Balfour has shown how the replanting 
of trees in India has re-opened its lost springs. Lord 
Stratford de Eedcliffe tells us that after speculators had 
obtained permission to cut the forest of Belgrade, the 
contract had to be annulled ; for the reservoirs at Con- 
stantinople, in consequence, began to fail.* How much of 
the spread of the Ar^aixjrace was due to the formation of 
the Persian deserts, and that of the Hebrew race to the 
new sterility of Syria and Palestine, are curious questions 
for the cultivators of almost every branch of physical 
science to take some part in settling satisfactorily. 

There is still another class of causes affecting the migra- 
tion of races, to illustrate the nature of which it is only 
needful to refer to the alleged destruction of the Indians 
of the United States by a universal pestilence, previous 
to the appearance of the English colonists at Plymouth 
Hock j and to that less apocryphal destruction of the same 
ill-fated race subsequently by syphilis, and smallpox, and 
scarlet fever, and fire-water, imported among the tribes 
from the homesteads of the whites. 

But as nature never repeats herself, so every migration 
that has ever taken place in history, or before history, had 
features of its own ; varying, as it did, from all others in its 
force and velocity, in its brilliancy, in its scope and out- 
spread, in its influence for good or evil, and therefore in 
its consequences at the present day. 

From the background of written history, two great mi- 
grations stand out pre-eminent — one which affected the 
religious development of the human mind ; and one, in- 

* Proc. R. Geog. Soc, p. 106. May, 1865. Dr Livingstone, however, has 
refused his assent to this explanation. He vouches, indeed, for the facts, 
and gives instances of the drought of springs in his own garden, and names 
old water-beds, now dry, still called ' rivers ' by the natives ; but he ascribed 
the phenomenon to the rise of the western edge of the continent to a 
higher level above the sea, and to the production of fissures, like that of 
the Victoria Falls, draining interior lakes, changing their levels, and 
making humid winds dry. Dr Kirk objects that wood in Central Africa 
is abundant on the Zambesi, and that there is an average amount of popu- 
lation, but insufficient to extirpate the forest, only using wood for fuel. 
He is, therefore, inclined to ascribe the dryness of Southern as well as 
Northern Africa to atmospheric currents. 



144 ON THE EARLY [LECT 

augurating the new era of universal liberty and Christian 
philanthropy : — the migration of the Abrahamic race into 
Palestine, two thousand years before the advent of Christ ; 
and the emigration of Anglo-Saxon colonists to the New 
World and to Australia. Of the latter, it is not here the 
place to speak; but the other is more closely connected 
with our subject, as it relates directly to the earliest civil- 
ization of the globe. I do not myself believe with entire 
confidence in the personal existence of the Jewish patriarchs. 
For you will find in the old Hindoo mythologies the names 
of Abram, Isaac, and Judah, ranged in a similar order and 
connection. Brahma's son, Ikswaka, was the great-grand- 
father of Yadu.* The Hebrews of Palestine were but a 
single twig of that wide-spreading branch of the Shemitic 
tree which had its original seats in central Asia, and mi- 
grating southward and westward over Persia, Mesopotamia, 
Arabia, and Syria, entered Egypt under the name of 
Hyksos. We read in Genesis that Abram came from Ur of 
the Chaldees, which all the Fathers have considered to be 
Edessa or Orfa, in the western division of northern Meso- 
potamia, nine miles from the Euphrates^ but which the 
excavations of the British consul, Mr Taylor, have shown 
to be in the south, near the junction of the Tigris and 

Euphrates.^ 

We are also told in the book of Numbers (xiii. 22) that 
Hebron, the city of the Hebrews, and the head- quarters of 
the Abrahamites, was built by them seven years before 
Zoan, or Tanis, in Egypt, where are now to be seen the 
masterpieces of Hyksos architecture. 

You remember that Isaac had a legendary brother Esau, 
the father of the Arabian nomades. 

We must not judge this people by the Jew sutlers in 
the army of the Potomac ; nor by the three- crowned hat- 
pedlers, crying ' O'Clo' ! ' along the slums and stews of 

* Icswaca, Surya (the sun), Soma or Chandra (the moon), Yadu (Judah), 
Chahuman, Pramara, &c. Ant. Radjpoot MSS. A Sanscrit edition gives 
Icshwaca, Soma, Yadu, Pramara, &c. MSS. Index, H. 20. 

f Callirrhoe in Pliny, v. 21 ; Antiochia ; Justinopolis ; and supposed 
to be the ark (ereck) fe? of Gen. x. 10. ■ Two days' journey S.E. of it is 
Charrse (Harran),the hrn (Harran) pp of Gen. xi. 31, xii. 5, xxvii. 43, 
xxviii. 10, xxix. 4 ; 2 Kings xix. 12 ; Isaiah xxxvii. 12, and Ezekiel 
xxvii. 23. Here Crassus was defeated. 

t Proc. Geog. Soc. 1865, Jan. 9, p. 39= 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 145 

London. We must seek it in its native place, where it is 
a king. Not crouched against the walls of the mosque of 
Omar at Jerusalem, but on horseback in the desert, swing- 
ing the scimitar or hurling the lance of the Saracen ; or 
in the professor's chair at Cordova, translating, expound- 
ing, and enlarging all the philosophies of foregoing ages. 
We must regard those fine processions of tall, grave, long- 
robed merchants, entering the villages of Liberia and Sierra 
Leone ; each man a judge of righteousness, incapable of 
levity or meanness, noble in speech and conduct, and propa- 
gating the faith of Islam to-day with the same zeal with 
which their fathers fought for it a thousand years ago. 
Study the Arabs in the Indian Ocean, on the islands of 
Java and Sumatra, surrounded by other races — Malays, 
Hindoos, Negroes, and Chinese, — and you will not only 
acknowledge their superior blood, but remark their con- 
sciousness of this superiority. To this Arab or typical 
Hebrew Shemite the old prophecy gives the tent ; and the 
Hamite and the Japhetite are to come into it to serve him. 
Arabs are the commercial masters of the tropics. Hebrews 
rule the politics of every government in Christendom by | 
slips of paper from their counting-rooms. They have 
stamped their religious conceptions upon the written his- 
tory of half the globe. They have afforded to the world 
its noblest thinkers, its grandest poets, its most fiery 
orators, its sweetest musicians, its largest-minded mer- 
chants, and its most absolute martyrs to patriotism and 
conscience. Whence came, then, this grand race, and 
where did it make its first appearance in history ? 

The recent discoveries of M. Mariette, perhaps the ablest 
and most successful of all explorers in the valley of the 
Nile, have conferred upon ethnology two inestimable boons. 
First, he has opened up a world of monuments relating to 
a part of Egyptian history about which we knew nothing, 
and the most interesting part of all — the earliest. And 
secondly, he has dispelled the last shades of doubt 
which hung about the authenticity of Manetho's lists of 
kings. His discovery of the monuments of the early 
Memphite dynasties will become important to us here- 
after, when we discuss the architectural ideas of the ear- 
liest men. 

But the second point is of importance here. For M. 

10 



146 ON THE EAELY [LECT. 

Mariette, by placing it beyond dispute that the list of 
Egyptian dynasties and kings which Manetho gives us, is 
not only genuine, but constructed in the ordinary manner 
in which all governmental or official lists are constituted, 
viz. by taking only the legitimate sovereigns of the whole 
realm, and each one only for that time during which he 
reigned the acknowledged legal monarch, — has put an end 
to all attempts to shorten the Egyptian chronology upon 
the supposition that many of Manetho's kings and even 
dynasties were contemporaneous, — attempts made of 
course solely in the interest of the Rabbinical age of the 
world. The 6th dynasty, for instance, it was long supposed 
reigned at Elephantine in southern Egypt, while the 7th 
was reigning with independent powers at Memphis in the 
north. But M. Mariette has disinterred monuments of 
both those dynasties on the sites of both their capitals, viz. 
at Elephantine in Upper Egypt, and at Sakkara near Mem- 
phis at the head of the Delta. Each dynasty therefore 
must have ruled over the whole kingdom ; and conse- 
quently the two dynasties could not have been contempo- 
raneous. 

In like manner the 13th dynasty, which had its seat 
at Thebes, must have preceded the 14th dynasty, which 
had its seat at Xois, because from the colossal statues of 
its kings discovered at San near Xois, it must have reigned 
there also. 

For 1700 years before Christ, that is, from the end of 
the 17th dynasty, that of the Hyksos, onwards, the his- 
tory of Egypt is well known ; and in all this length of re- ; 
cord Manetho has been found correct ; he has not doubled 
any reign by inserting a contemporaneous ruler before or 
after it. We have no right, therefore, to suspect him of 
having committed this blunder in the earlier portion of his 
list. But such a blunder could only be intentional ; and 
he could have had no prejudice to serve by such a wilful 
sacrifice of truth, in favour of a long chronology. His 
reputation is but just recovering from the load of obloquy 
which the Jews, and their disciples the Protestant chrono- 
logists, have heaped upon it, for no better reason than that 
they think they must make the history of all nations upon 
earth draw up its knees to lie within the child's cradle of 
the Hebrew scriptures. Father Jerome tells us how the 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF- MAN. 147 

Rabbis of Tiberias doctored these Hebrew scriptures, 
by slipping back the birth of the firstborn of each of the 
antediluvian patriarchs one hundred years upon his 
father's life, in order to bring the birth of Christ at the 
year 4000 of the world's creation, instead of at the year 
6000. He tells us that their motive was to take the millen- 
nium argument out of the Christians' mouths. For the 
early Christians claimed against the Jews that Jesus must 
be the Messiah, because he had come according to 
prophecy current among the Jews themselves, at the dawn 
of the great Sabbath, the seven thousandth year. When 
we reject Manetho' s list, we do it in behalf of the Jews, 
who chuckle at our simplicity ; and we do it also in the 
face of the old Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, the 
chronology of which is 2000 years longer than that of King 
James' translation, showing us how the trick of the Jews 
was played. 

One of the most satisfactory evidences we have that 
Manetho did not double either his dynasties or his reigns, 
is the fact that the hieroglyphic lists of kings, especi- 
ally the new list lately discovered at Abydos, contain a 
multitude of kings' names which do not appear on 
Manetho's list at all.* During the rule of those fierce 
strangers, the Hyksos, there were several native dynasties 
maintaining a precarious existence in various sections of the 
Valley of the Nile ; but the great historian, true to his 
principle, that kings de facto were the only kings de jure, 
refuses to insert in his list the names of these little native 
pretenders ; he engrosses only the names of the Hyksos 
monarchs, although foreigners and tyrants in his list of the 
17th dynasty, because they really reigned, f 

A learned lady of England has exerted herself to prove 

* Consult not only Manetho, but Eratosthenes, and the tablets of 
Abydos, of Thebes, and of Sakkara, and the papyrus of Turin. The grand 
temple at Abydos.. just discovered by Mariette, presents a new list, 
analogous to those we have already had, but admirably preserved. It is 
of the time of Sethos I., 1200 B.C. Sethos has selected "77 names of pre- 
decessors to make up his list, which ends like those of Manetho, and the 
Turin papyrus with Menes and Atothis, Touthmes III. (1500 B.C.) 
makes offerings to 61 predecessors, on the tablet in the Imperial Library 
at Paris (Renan). 

f Renan, Revue des Deux Mondes, April, 1865, p. 664. Mariette' s 
Apercu. 



148 ON THE EAELY [LECT. 

that these mysterious intruders into Egyptian history, the 
Hyksos, were the same people who are called in the early 
Hebrew writings the Susim (Hak-Sus, meaning f king of 
the Susim '), a • mighty nation first heard of as inhabit- 
ing the Hauran country, south of Damascus, and east of 
the Upper Jordan. Whether this be true or not, the first 
appearance of these nomades seems to be described upon 
the walls of the tombs of Beni Hassan, built under the 
12th dynasty, nearly 3000 years B.C. There the traveller 
beholds, for the first time, the pictures of processions of 
patriarchs with great eyes and aquiline noses,* coming with 
their wives and little oues, their poor utensils, and instru- 
ments of music, to request the governor of Egypt to give 
them lands to dwell in, to escape a famine in their own. 
It is the story of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph, told by 
Egyptians ; the first pacific modest appearance of that ter- 
rible race which was to throw all Asia afterwards into dis- 
order, take possession of the land that succoured it, and 
finally give the human race the grandest, the holiest, and 
the most enduring part of its history. 

The distinguished Egyptologist, Dr Brugsch, and an 
advocate for the authenticity of the Mosaic account of the 
Exodus, states the accordance of the monuments with that 
account in a much better and more conclusive manner than 
Hengstenberg has done, and introduces into its scenery 
fresher tints. One chapter of his charming little book, 
Aus dem Orient, is entitled ' Moses and the Monuments/ 
and in this chapter he resumes all that the hieroglyphics 
are as yet known to teach about the Hebrews. Tanis, the 
Hyksos capital, called hieroglyphically hauar, Avaris, was 
besieged and taken by the first king of the 18th dynasty. 
Its Pharaohs effected the conquest of Asia, planting their 
furthest triumphal obelisks on the borders of Armenia, and 
returned with armies of captives to build innumerable 
monuments along both banks of the Nile. Pictures remain 

* But the Hyksos are described as red haired and blue eyed, which 
gives origin to the theory that they were the earliest appearance of the 
Gothic or Scandinavian race of the Iron age. Kenan remarks that the 
Hyksos monuments are at San, Tanis, or Zoan, B" 1 ^ 1 ? ^X which was 
founded seven years after Hebron, according to ^ Numbers xiii. 22. 
Hebron was held by 1-pTS (ahimn) ^v (ssi) and ^p (Olmi) the sons 
("H"^) of Anak (p^n). Here again we have Susim. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OP MAN. 149 

to us of these captives drawing water, treading clay, 
spreading out and piling up their tales of bricks to build a 
temple with, under the supervision of Egyptian figures 
armed with rods. The 19th dynasty had for its first three 
kings, Ramses I., Seti I., and Ramses II., the great 
Sesostris, who reigned 66 years, and pushed his conquests 
north, east, south, and west. To guard his frontier against 
the Hittites of Palestine, he forced his native Hyksos serfs 
and foreign military slaves to build a chain of forts across 
the isthmus of Suez, of which the principal were Ramses 
and Pithom (Pachtum, Pelusium), names mentioned in 
Exodus i., ii., as built by Hebrews, under the tyrannical 
oppression of a Pharaoh (Theban per-aa, Memphite 
puee-ao, means high house, or sublime porte), who knew 
not Joseph. One of the papyri of the British Museum, of 
the date of Ramses II. (1250 — 1300 B.C., Anastasi, iii. p. 1) 
is a description, by a scribe named Pinebsa to his master 
Amenemaput, of the aspect of things in and around the 
new city Ramses, — of the entrance into it of the great 
Pharaoh, — and of the petitions for relief against their 
overseers, which they thronged about him to present. 
Another papyrus reads : ' Sum of buildings 12, by people 
brought from their residences to make brick in the city ; 
they made their tale of bricks daily, without stopping, 
until finished. Thus the task given me by my master has 
been accomplished.'' These conscripts were not Egyptians ; 
they were called apuru, Hebrews. They are often men- 
tioned, on the stones and in papyri, as at work, guarded by 
Mazai, the Libyan gendarmerie of Egypt. In a papyrus of 
the Leyden Museum, an employe of Ramses II., Kauitzir, 
reports to his upper scribe Bakenptah : ' May my lord be 
pleased with my execution of his assigned work, as follows : 
distribution of food to the soldiers, and to the Hebrews 
dragging stones for the great city Ramses Meiamoun the 
truth-loving, under the oversight of police chief Amena- 
man. I gave them food monthly, according to my master's 
excellent arrangement/ A second papyrus in the same 
museum is written by one Keniaman to his superior, the 
Katena or general Hui : ' I have fulfilled my lord's orders 
to give food to the soldiers as well as to the Hebrews who 
drag stones, &c' In the rock valley Hamamat, along 
which the great commercial route of Egypt from Coptos 



150 ON THE EAELY [lECT. 

on the Nile to Berenice on the Red Sea, is an inscription 
describing the quarry work done by 9000 men, among 
whom was a squad of 800 Hebrews under escort of Mazai 
police, who had- brought the poor devils probably all the 
way from Goshen in the Delta. 

Now if the Hebrews' story of their own wrongs and of 
their deliverance is to be believed, we must suppose Joseph 
to have come down into Egypt under one of the Hyksos 
kings of the 1 7th dynasty, a Shemite like himself. When 
the native Pharaohs suppressed the Hyksos government, 
they oppressed the Hyksos colonists, who remained, forming 
perhaps nearly the whole population of the eastern wing of 
the Delta. Moses was born, say in the sixth year of 
Ramses II., 300 years after Joseph's day. In his tenth 
year Ramses entered his new city, built with Hebrew 
hands. Add to the remaining 60 years of his reign the 
20 years which his son Menephtha reigned, and we get 
the 80 years of age which Moses had when he led his 
people forth. 

Ramses II., like Cassar and Napoleon afterwards, was 
always in trouble, sitting on a throne planted over mines 
which any moment might explode. He made an ' extradi- 
tion treaty ' with Chetasar, king of the Hittites, who bound 
himself to return to Egypt all fugitive Hebrews found in 
Palestine ; and the same fearful policy might have actually 
gone the length of an edict of universal male Hebrew child- 
murder, in view of the eventuality which the Hebrew 
Scripture thus expresses : c for when a war arises, they may 
join our enemies and fight against us, and escape out of the 
land/ Ramses and his successor added to this fierce 
oppression a religious seduction; they instituted an 
ostentatious worship of the sun-god Baal of the Shemite 
race. Ramses presented his own colossus (now in the 
Berlin Museum) to the temple of the sun in Zoan, where, 
says the poet of Psalms lxxviii. 12, 43, Jehovah (by Moses) 
( showed his wonders.'' Menephtha built no temples, but 
inscribed his own name on his fathers' monuments with 
the title ( Worshipper of Sutech-Baal of Tanis/ and cut the 
image of Baal on the back of one of his own colossi with 
the figure of his son worshipping before it. 

The name Moses is now identified with the Egyptian 
mas or masstj, meaning ' the child/ a name borne by many 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OFJM. .. 151 

personages of that age, one of whom is entitled on a monu- 
ment of the reign of Menephtha, ' Viceroy of Ethiopia;' 
and this inscription probably gave rise to the assertion of 
Josephus, that Moses, when a young man, led an Egyptian 
army into Ethiopia to besiege Meroe, and married the 
princess Tharbe out of gratitude for her assistance in 
entering that city. The Hebrew story makes him the 
adopted son -of Ramses' daughter, and says that he was 
learned in all the customs of the Egyptians, as in fact 
might be inferred from the Hebrew ceremonial which 
bears his name, and the restricted monotheism which 
idealizes all the writings going by his name ; for in the 
roll of the dead deposited in Egyptian graves, God is not 
named, but only designated as the nuk pu nuk, ' I Am 
what I Am/ precisely the title 'Jehovah' of the Pentateuch. 

At this point, however, all alliance between the monu- 
ments and the Mosaic story ceases. Several centuries 
elapse before the Sheshonk of the 22nd dynasty appears 
in Hebrew history as the Shishak who besieged Jerusalem. 
Of the Exodus, of the wanderings in the wilderness, of the 
settlement in Palestine, the monuments say not one word. 
Coming directly from the land of hieroglyphic writing upon 
stone, and learned in the art, — leading a people who had 
not only had memorial sculpture before their eyes all their 
lifetime, but had themselves built up the walls and set the 
statues, steles, and obelisks, which bore descriptions of 
every public event, is it not an incredible supposition that 
Moses should have wrought such wonders, traversed such 
a length of route, encamped beneath the granite cliffs of the 
peninsula, and in the defiles of Mount Hor so many years, 
without leaving a trace of his existence, a line of writing, 
a letter, a scratch to authenticate his story, not even the 
two tablets on which he is said to have inscribed his deca- 
logue ! There are thousands of rude figures in the val- 
ley Mokatteb, and in other ravines descending from 
Mount Serbal, and they have been studied carefully by a 
multitude of scholars, under the strongest temptation to 
make them out Mosaic, but it has not been done. No 
Egyptologist can speak with patience of Mr Forster's 
book. 

Our faith is always in degrees. We believe in Alfred 
more than in Arthur, — more in the Gracchi than in 



152 ON THE EARLY [LECT. 

Romulus and Remus. Time and distance have great 
dominion over historic faith. Alexander is to us a real 
personage ; we believe in Socrates not quite so clearly, but 
yet more confidently than in Lycurgus ; in Lycurgus more 
than in Cadmus ; in Cadmus more than in Hercules ; and 
not at all in Jupiter and Semele. But time is but a single 
element in the constitution of the Credence that we give to 
past events, and not at all the most important one ; other- 
wise Ramses II. would not be to the mind of scholars of 
the present day as solid a reality as Cassar or Napoleon. 

Time goes for nothing when we have contemporary docu- 
ments. These are the legitimate masters of our faith. In 
their absence there must always be more or less of anarchy 
in history, more or less doubt mixed with our faith. 
Ramses as Sesostris, that is, before his monuments were 
discovered, was the fanciful hero of a Greek fable, — quite 
on a par with Hercules. The traveller who deciphers 
Bonivard's signature on the stone column to which he was 
chained in the Chateau of Chillon, — or the half-finished 
couplet of Byron at the top of the Giralda of Seville, — who 
stands alone in the desert of Murgab, before the marble 
fragment which bears the winged relief of the old Persian 
king', and reads the words : ' 1 am Cyrus the king, the 
Achasmenian/ — or who catches a glimpse of some noble 
record in the valley of the Nile, such as that of the an- 
cient governor of Lycopolis : ' Never have I taken the child 
from the mother's breast, nor the poor man from the side 
of his wife/ — he feels the full meaning of the term contem- 
porary testimony by means of monuments. 

But there is a third element of history which regulates 
the other two, and by which we criticise and limit the 
value of contemporary monuments, — it is the vraisemblable. 
A tale told by the mountain (tel) itself cannot be believed 
unless it represents events as flowing in that self-same cur- 
rent of the commonplace in which our lives flow on. The es- 
sential sameness of the manners and customs of mankind — 
the long-enduring unchangeableness of the social life of 
man — the steadfastness of man's relationships to nature — 
must not be violated, or we cannot believe. Even when 
Sesostris was a myth like Hercules, there was this differ- 
ence : the story of Sesostris was extraordinary, but proba- 
ble were there but records left : but that of Hercules 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. -. 153 

would be incredible however many monuments were left. 

Now, judging the Mosaic story by these canons, in which 
all agree, we find it of an age far antedating all precise 
history, — we find it utterly unsupported by contemporary 
monumental records, — and we feel it to be a splendid series 
of incredibilities from first to last. His birth, his miracles, 
his exodus, his converse with Jehovah, and his mysterious 
disappearance, — all stamp the history with an indelible 
character of myth, which not a single discovery of any 
branch of science has yet repaid the endeavour to efface. 

In less degree — in a far less degree — but still in essen- 
tially the same mode, the legends of the Jews of a date 
previous to the reign of Solomon are utterly unhistorical, 
although the stories of the Judges are probable enough. 
Nothing prevents us from identifying the Hebrews of the 
monarchy as descendants of the Hyksos race, nor from 
supposing that the Mosaic records were inventions of a 
later age, based on a mixture of Hyksos traditions, Arabian 
poetry, Zoroastrian mythology, and genuine Egyptian and 
Assyrian monumental history. Nothing prevents us from 
concluding that the Egyptian inscriptions record merely a 
local and temporary eddy through the isthmus of Suez, of 
that master flood of migration, which, starting from the 
centres of Arianism, about the Hindu Koosh, in Afghan- 
istan, and allying itself originally with the movements of 
the Children of the Sun and the Children of the Moon in 
north-western India, spread itself over Palestine, and 
Syria, and Arabia, and then, through the dispersion of the 
Jews, into all the countries of the modern world ; a migra- 
tion which, as I have said, is the most important of all that 
have occurred since man was placed by his Creator on the 
earth. 

But in an anthropological sense the history of the He- 
brews is of far inferior importance when compared with that 
of the early Egyptians, for of this last we have a world of 
contemporary documents, and therefore the most precise 
information. It is to the earliest monuments of Egypt 
that we must turn for pictures of the social state of a 
race of men, standing in the boldest contrast with all that 
we know, by inference from the relics of the diluvium and 
the cave deposits and the palafittes, of the social state of 
far more ancient and more savage races, living under less 



154 



ON THE EARLY 



[lect. 



CHART 

Ancient Empire: 
Thinis Dynasty 
Thinis ; 
Memphis 
Memphis 
Memphis 
Elephantine 
Memphis 
Memphis 
Heliopolis 
Heliopolis 




OF EGYPTIAN HISTOEY. 

lasted 1940 years (? Manetho.) 
Menes.^ Pyramid of Cochome. 

^Monuments rare. 769 vears. 

J 
Cheops. Pyramids. Mt Sinai (Wady Magara). 

Tombs at Saqqara. 
Nitocris; Apappus. 

rMonuments wanting. 436 years. 
J Egypt perhaps overrun by foreigners. 
The end of the old writing, religion, 
civil service, &c. 



V 



Middle Empire : lasted 1361 years (? Manetho). 

Thebes XI. Entef, Mentouhotep. ) Obelisks oldest known. 

Thebes XII, Osortasen, Amenemha. } Beni Hassan. Lake Mosris. 

Thebes XIII. Nofrehotep, Sebekhotep. 60 kings, 463 years. 

Xosi XIV. Nothing known, of this. At its close commenced 

Entef XV. invasions of the Hyksos, lasting 400 years ; 

Entef XVI. ended with the establishment of the Hyksos. 

San XVII. Saites (Hyksos). Colossi. Sphinxes. 



Classic Empire. 



Thebes 



XVIII. 



Thebes XIX, 

Thebes XX. 

Thebes; S&n. XXI. 
Tell-basta XXII. 
San XXIII. 



Sa'is 
Sais 



XXIV. 

XXV. 

XXVI. 



Amosis (Ahmes). Amenophis. Thoutmes. Queer 
Hatasou. Thebes illustrated. Asia conquered 
Sun worship introduced by Khou-en-aten. 

Ramses I. Seti. Sesostris (Pentaour). Menephtha, 

Ramses III. (Sea tight.) Asiatic influences. 

Priest dynasty at Thebes. Manetho's kings at San. 

Sheshonk (takes Jerusalem). Egypt a part of Asia. 

Twelve barons divide Lower Egypt. Upper Egypt 
becomes a province of Soudan. 

Bocchoris, reigning six years, the only king. 

Sabacon(Cush) conquers Egypt. 50 years. Tahraka. 

Psammiticus, the Libyan ? Greek mercenaries. 
Periplus of Africa. Canal of Suez reattempted. 



Persian, Greek, and Roman Empires. 

XXVII. Cambyses. Darius. 121 years. 
Sa'is XXVIII. Wars with the Persians. 

Mendes XXIX. Wars with the Persians. 

Sebennytes XXX. Nectanebo I. Last king expelled by the Persians 

XXXI. Darius III. Six years. 
Alexandria XXXII. Alexander I., II. 

Alexandria XXXIII. Ptolemies, Cleopatra, Berenice, Arsinoe. 
Alexandria XXXIV. Roman proconsuls. 



VI.] SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. -. 155 

favourable auspices for health, of body, peace of mind, and 
growth in human culture. This picture I will now endea- 
vour to place before your eyes. 

But to make the matter as plain as possible, I must put 
it in a graphical form, and show by a chronological chart 
the true relationship in point of time between the Hyksos 
episode, and the beginnings of Egyptian civilization. This 
chart will show the four great empires of Egypt, beginning 
with that of the Pyramids and ancient tombs of Memphis, 
5000 years B.C. And you will notice at a glance, that the 
17th dynasty, that of the Hyksos, comes midway in the 
column between the time of that ancient empire with its 
oldest of earthly monuments and our own day. Perhaps 
3300 years preceded the fall of the Hyksos dynasty, and 
3500 years have succeeded it.* 

Such has been the history of Egypt. Seven thousand 
years have passed since the fourth king of the first dynasty 
built the first pyramid of Cochome, the first which greets 
the traveller going forth into the desert from the gates of 
Cairo. f Yet, even then, Egypt was an old country; its 
people civilized ; its architecture grand in idea and perfect 
in execution; its statuary as natural as any group of 
Rogers' statuettes; its language not only formed but re- 
duced to writing ; its agricultural life rich with oxen, asses, 
dogs, and monkeys, antelopes, and gazelles, geese, ducks, 
and swans, and slaves of Numidia. But the horse and the 
camel of Arabia were wanting ; they knew nothing either 
of the elephant or the giraffe of Africa ; the sheep of Eu- 
rope and the poultry of China are nowhere to be seen ; nor 
had the house cat yet assumed her witch-role on the hearth. 

* See Appendix B to this lecture. 

f In his paper on the Antiquity of Man, read before the last meeting 
of the Ethnological Section of the British Association, meeting at Dundee, 
August, 1867, Mr Crawfurd, who is a believer in the multiple origin of 
our race, adopts Champolleon's date for the beginning of Egyptian history, 
9000 years before Christ, and argues for an immensely older history, upon 
the ground that language, civilization, letters, arts, agriculture, and the 
domestication of animals are slow processes. Too much stress, however, 
must not be laid upon this consideration, for when genius speaks the times 
obey and hasten to realize its propositions, and to fulfil its prophecies. 
Sir J. Lubbock, although an advocate of the unity of origin, agreed with 
him upon the point of the antiquity of Egyptian civilization, and the 
necessity for previous ages of emergence from the savage life of the cave- 
dwellers. 



156 ON THE EARLY [lECT. 

But these people at the beginning of written history had 
no ships for commerce, and could not have introduced 
what existed around the shores of the Mediterranean, or 
along the Indian Ocean. But what did then exist ? The 
rest of mankind seem to have been savages, without cats 
also. Probably neither the horse, nor camel, nor elephant, 
nor sheep, nor pheasant, had yet been tamed, at all events 
not within reasonable reach of these rich farmers of the 
Nile. That they enjoyed a happy, peaceful, and sometimes 
a jolly life, is easy to see, for the walls of the Memphite 
tombs are covered with pictures of feasts, and games, and 
dances, and boat tournaments, such as amuse the populace 
of Paris in July ; there you see poets chanting verses, and 
dancing girls with hair tressed up with plates of gold. 
But you may look around in vain for the symbols of any 
kind of warfare. Not a trace of military life is visible on 
any monument previous to the 12th dynasty : and very 
little trace of religion. How the dynasties were founded, 
or how they were overthrown, or changed, we cannot 
learn ; nor how the priests, if any then existed, turned an 
honest penny. The deity had neither name nor image. 
Osiris was unknown. The dog Anubis is the only guardian 
of these primeval mansions of the dead, the first deity, as 
the first friend, of man. We can make out only the signs 
of a purely patriarchal civilization, in a land of peace and 
plenty. Each tomb is built by each farmer for his eternal 
residence. His effigy is seen in it, surrounded by the 
pictures of his wife, his children, his servants, his scribes, 
his dogs and green monkeys, and his household goods. 
And all this 3000 years before Solomon built his temple on 
Mount Moriah, or the Assyrian his palace on the platform 
of Koujunjik. 

We may speculate upon the assertion that the Egyptians 
of the delta of the Nile sailed up the Adriatic and settled 
the delta of the Po, then crossed the Alps and descended 
to settle anew upon the delta of the Ehine, from whence 
they seized on all the smaller deltas of the British islands. 
We have nothing but fancy to guide us in determining 
how far the older civilization of the Egyptians modified the 
influence of the great emigrant race — the Phoenician — in 
forming the civilization of Europe. We have no sufficient 
demonstration of any such influence radiating from ancient 



VI. SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN. 157 

Egypt, except in matters of religion,, and through -the in- 
termediation of other races, of which more hereafter. For 
the present let me leave, impressed npon your imagina- 
tions, one clear image — the contrast, the marvellous con- 
trast, between the two pictures I have drawn. On the 
one hand we have this picture of peace and plenty among 
the ancient landholders of the valley of the Nile. On the 
other hand, we have that picture of want and warfare 
dominating the life of the wretched savages in the pine- 
woods of Scandinavia, and standing for the condition of 
the human race, or rather of all the other human races 
existing at that ancient epoch, outside of the valley of the 
Sphinx. 

Yet such a contrast still exists in all its grim integrity 
upon the earth. Compare the palaces and parks of Eng- 
land and New England with the wigwams of the west or 
the slave cabins of the south ; with the utter homelessness of 
the Hottentot and Australian in the one hemisphere, or the 
wretched reflection of primeval barbarism among ' Jes 
miserables' in Paris or in London. And so the world 
hoards up its old letters, although they can be only re-read 
with shudderings and tears. 



158 



LECTURE VII. 

ON LANGUAGE AS A TEST OF KACE. 

The subject of the language of man will engross our 
attention this evening. 

Those who believed in the origin of all the human races 
from a single pair, found the question of the probable lan- 
guage spoken by that pair and their immediate descendants 
considerably simplified. The fathers of the Church took 
for granted that the language of the oldest writings which 
the Church accepted as sacred and divine was the language 
in which Adam and Eve addressed each other in Paradise. 
When the critics of a later age began to find reasons for 
believing that the Mosaic records had been compiled from 
the most worthy scraps of the most ancient written tradi- 
tions, it only strengthened the claims of the Hebrew to be 
the language of the antediluvian patriarchs. 

But when the science of comparative philology was dis- 
covered, the special students of certain special languages, 
in their enthusiastic devotion to their special studies, 
began to put in other claims for this high honour, and to 
dispute the pre-eminence of the Hebrew, contending that it 
must have suffered so many changes, no one could tell what 
it had been in the beginning. 

As the learned world woke up to an appreciation of the 
beautiful structure and great antiquity of the Sanscrit, 
many were disposed to consider that sacred language of 
southern Asia the mother language of mankind. 

Then came the Egyptologists, with their monumental 

letters, and improved chronology, antedating that of the 

i Hebrews by severaljthousands of years. They proved that 

the Coptic language, although allied to the Hebrew, was in 

fact the language of the Pharaohs, before Abram had come 



ON LANGUAGE AS A TEST OF RACE. 159 

out of Ur of the Chaldees. Coptic must therefore have 
been the speech of Paradise. 

There were some to demand for the Armenian language 
the credit of being the oldest in the world. And there have 
been most learned Welshmen to parade the fact that their 
British mother tongue could afford a reasonable etymology 
for every one of its own words, in proof that it alone could 
be the aboriginal speech of the world. 

But the progress of the science of comparative philology 
has extinguished, one by one, all these absurd pretensions, 
even without the necessity of a reference to the goodness 
of the foundation on which they rested, viz. the truth of 
the legend of a Paradise and a first human pair. 

But although the science of comparative philology has 
been able to extinguish the claims set up by each individual 
language to be that which the earliest people on the earth 
spoke, it has not been able, on the other hand, to point 
out what was the original language. We are just as far 
removed to-day from knowing that as we ever were. 

Comparative philology is one of the most beautiful and 
attractive of all the modern sciences. It is fresh and 
vigorous. It has an immense coterie of disciples and many 
masters. It has conquered a large territory and set up a 
-splendid throne. It makes advances every year. It has 
established laws which are unshakable. It is a world of 
truth ; no one doubts it. It is, in some respects, fully the 
equal of the other sciences. But in saying thus much, we 
have said all we dare to say. 

In other and very important respects, the science of com- 
parative philology is young and raw, undisciplined and 
disorganized ; or rather, rising, as it has, like a Phoenix 
from the ashes of its predecessor, out of the cinders of what 
was known in the middle ages as the science of Language, 
it still retains, involved in its constitution, quantities of 
that unorganized magma, all the elements of which it is, 
bound some day to reduce to perfect order. In this 
respect it is far behind the so-called physical and natural 
history sciences. Some of its most important principles 
have yet to be settled. Some of its grandest questions 
have hardly been announced. Its doctors still pursue the 
most opposite methods. Its books are not only full of 
irreconcilable contradictions; they do not yet state any 



160 ON LANGUAGE. [lECT. 

grand body of universally accepted facts out of which fresh 
investigations can deduce acceptable generalizations. 

The true principle for a correct classification of the lan- 
guages, for instance, has not yet been established. Philo- 
logists have indeed worked out a number of fine groups, 
and settled to some extent their boundaries. They can 
talk to you about the Indo- Germanic family, and show you 
how it is broadly distinguished from the Shemitic family 
on the one side, and from the Tartar family on the other. 
They can separate the Teutonic languages from the Celtic 
and classic groups on the one side, and from the Slavonic 
group on the other. They can distinguish the southern 
or Teutonic from the northern Gothic or Scandinavian 
sub-families. They can designate seven or eight chief 
subdivisions of a single language, like the French. They 
can go much farther even than that, and count up its patois 
or local variations until they reach an incredible number.* 
And all this amounts to something certainly. It repre- 
sents a vast amount of hard work. But it does not repre- 
sent, as yet, a law of classification. There is no established 
and accepted classification of the four or five thousand lan- 
guages of the earth. There is even the greatest difference 
of opinion among philologists as to the true principles 
upon which we are to decide whether a language actually 
belongs, and why it must be considered as belonging, to 
one group rather than to another. Some base the classifi- 
cation upon the grammar : others upon the dictionary. 
The science of comparative philology is now in the same 
state in which comparative zoology was before the days of 
Cuvier, when the bats were classed among the birds, 
because they lived by flying in the air ; and cetaceans, 
whales, seals, walruses, &c, with fishes, although they 
breathed the air and suckled their young; and lemurs 
with squirrels, instead of with the monkeys, where they 
actually belong. 

And, in fact, we may as well say at the outset, that all the 
great questions which have come up for settlement in the 
other older and maturer sciences come up again in some 
analogous form for settlement in this young raw science of 

* See the variations on the words ' deux fils ' in the Transactions of the 
Antiquarian Society of France (C. 9. 13). 



VII.] AS A TEST OP RACE. •• 161 

comparative pliilology. And how indeed conld it happen 
otherwise ? For the things which we call words, are 
organic things, like animals and vegetables. They have 
roots and "branches. They grow and decay. They have 
fixed laws to govern their existence, like all other beings. 
They do not leap from onr months, helter-skelter, as the 
toads and jewels dropped from the mouths of the daughters 
of the cruel stepmother in the fairy tale. They are not 
accidentally created. We are not their voluntary creators. 
They breed in us and issue from us, not only from our lips, 
but from our brains, by laws as regular and permanent as 
those which govern the conception and birth of broods of 
fishes, birds, or serpents. Language therefore must be a 
department of natural history. New expressions or idioms 
appear upon the face of human society just as new species 
and varieties of animals and vegetables have successively 
made their appearance upon the surface of the earth, and 
in the waters of the sea. And words and languages perish 
and are preserved in the history of literature, precisely like 
those fossil forms of extinct plants and animals which we 
study in the geological deposits of the past. 

With the great fundamental principles of natural history 
therefore, which we have had before us already more than 
once daring the course of these lectures, we have again 
to deal to-night. Philology finds the same lions in 
its path to the House Beautiful which have frightened 
the other sciences, that have preceded it in pilgrimage. 

In the first place, there is the great possibility of spon- 
taneous production, or equivocal generation, as the natur- 
alists call it. Mr Crosse took certain mineral matter, 
boxed it up carefully so as to exclude the air, heated it so 
as to destroy all germs of previous life, and sent, for many 
weeks, a perpetual current of galvanism through it, so as 
to arouse the dormant powers of organic life. The result 
was, as he declares, that living insects made their appearance 
in great numbers. But the rest of the world doubts the 
fact ; a few only believe. Now what say philologists as to 
the possibility of a similarly spontaneous origin of a ivord 
out of the raw stuff of thought ? Some affirm that new 
words are continually appearing in all languages like Mr 
Crosse's acari. Others, on the contrary, stand by the old 
doctrine, that like breeds like, and that all living forms 

11 



162 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 

must come from germs or living cells, which are already 
organized nuclei of vital forces, or rather, in the language 
of the schoolmen, vital forms, formce formantes. Such 
philologists affirm, therefore, the necessary previous exist- 
ence of linguistic roots, and believe that all words must be 
developed out of roots ; that the great business of phi- 
lologists is to investigate roots in languages, to restrict the 
number of these roots in any language to the smallest 
quantity, and to compare the roots of different languages 
together, so as to obtain a true classification. A school of 
oologists exists, therefore, as really in the science of com- 
parative philology, as in that of comparative zoology. 

But when you come to consider these roots or germs of 
words, you find nothing in the shape of a settled principle. 
Some philologists consider all the roots of words as originally 
verbal, such as : to be, to go, to strike, to cut, to breathe. 
Others restrict this verbal character to a few roots, and call all 
the rest nouns, out of which verbs have been made. Some 
consider the root of a word reached when it is reduced to 
three letters ; others despise roots which consist of more 
than two letters. But nothing tells more plainly against 
the existence of any well-made-out law than the different 
number of roots to which different philologues reduce a 
given language. The Sanscrit, for instance, is said to have 
500 or 600 roots. But Kraitsir, before he died, had re- 
duced the number, in his own opinion, to a little over 200. 
Haldeman thinks no language can show more than 300. 

But the great question is about the spontaneous gener- 
ation of these germs, or roots. Then, at what age in the 
history of man did they appear ? Were there a certain 
number of aboriginal roots spoken by the tertiary, post- 
tertiary, or stone-age men ? or have word-roots been 
making their appearance all down through history, one 
at a time, or in groups, sufficiently numerous to institute 
new branches of language, or new languages ? Then again, 
by what law of life did the roots of words get created at 
first? or by what law do they continue to get created ? 
And if there be such a law of life for these word-roots, 
does it include in itself a law of permanence, and a law of 
universality, i. e. does it secure the creation of a given 
root-word in all languages ; and then, does it secure the 
continued existence of that root-word to the end of time ? 



VII.] AS A TEST OP RACE. -. 163 

Or, on the contrary, is there a law of change, by which no 
original root-word has been able to maintain its integrity, 
but has fallen from its first estate and become depraved ? 
or, to state in other words this last question, do we find, 
raging in this science of comparative philology, the same 
warfare respecting ' a law of development/ by which one 
word-form- species gradually changes to another, and so 
one language to another, by old roots dying out and new 
roots striking in to the common soil ? 

Let me take up two or three only of these questions, and 
state what I think is wanting to the science of philology 
to place it on a footing to do something for us in our in- 
vestigations into the early history of the human races and 
their migrations. For, at present, in spite of the high 
pretensions of its disciples, I do not think that we get any 
ethnological light from Philology worth speaking of ; but, 
on the contrary, I think that in the position which the 
science occupies, it casts a deep shadow of obscurity upon 
the whole subject of the human races. Whatever else, 
therefore, I must hurry over or omit to-night for want of 
time, or to avoid confusing your attention, this one thing, 
I wish to make clear, my reasons for believing that the 
method of philologists must be amended, and to a great 
extent re-modelled, before we can get rid of some of the 
grossest errors in ethnology, or really obtain a complete 
view of the relations which the human races hold to one 
another and to the present state of things. 

The origin of language may be regarded either, 1. as a 
supernatural revelation of a language already perfect to 
the first human beings; or, 2. as a power of language given 
to the first human beings in addition to all their other pe- 
culiar faculties as human beings ; or, 3. as merely a superior 
human development of a general power of language (or 
faculty of expression) possessed by the whole animal world, 
inherent, in fact, in the constitution of all animated beings 
as well as man. 

The first of these modes of conceiving the possible origin 
of language, as a divine revelation, was almost universally 
adopted by heathen philosophers and Christian theologians 
to a very recent date, and is still indulged by those who 
believe in Adam and Eve in Paradise. Although the most 
natural way of understanding the old legend that Jehovah 



164 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 

brought to Adam all the birds and beasts and creeping 
things, that he might give to each of them its nam e, would be 
to suppose existing in Adam's mental constitution a myste- 
rious faculty of 'representing what he saw and knew, by 
audible sounds, intelligible to his wife and children. 
Science, however, can take no note of the supernatural, 
unless it becomes natural and takes the oath of allegiance 
to nature. Nature itself is too supernatural to require any 
additions from the realms of human ignorance. And 
moreover, if there were more aboriginal human races than 
one, there would be needed as many repetitions of the 
same revelation of language ; unless to each race a different 
language were revealed ; in which case the confusion of 
tongues, at the building of the Tower of Babel, would have 
been anticipated. 

The "second and third modes of conceiving of the origin 
of language are the modes now adopted by men of science. 
And they only differ in degree according to our views of 
the relative dignity of man and the brutes. All philolo- 
gists are more or less disposed to place among the natural 
attributes of man a faculty for expressing himself, and ex- 
pressing the outside world also, in appropriate words. 

Some go farther and say, that this faculty for vocal 
utterance of mental feeling is common to man with the 
brutes; that the brutes are not brutes, i. e. mutes; that the 
animals all have parts of speech ; and that man has the 
faculty of speech only and simply because he is one of the 
animals. His faculty is larger and finer than theirs be- 
cause his brain is larger and finer than theirs ; because his 
mental, moral, and spiritual nature is more angelic; because 
his senses deal with a larger world, and his tastes are 
refined by civilization. But, however his poetry may soar, 
and his eloquence burn, and his prayers go up as accept- 
able incense before Him that sitteth upon the throne, and 
before the Lamb, these glorious phenomena of thought 
made flesh in language are as closely and eternally related 
to the bleating of the flocks and the warbling of birds as 
the infinite scope and sweep of solar systems in the heavenly 
spaces are closely and eternally related to the spiral flight 
of a bee when the hunter liberates it from his box, in a 
dingle of the forest, to guide him on to rob its hive. 

It makes no difference to the main question of the origin 



XII. 7 ] AS A TEST OF KACE. . 165 

of language, whether man takes the animals into partner- 
ship or not, provided he considers his faculty of language 
constitutional. 

But now we approach the difficulties. How is human 
language constitutional ? 

It may be asked in reply : How is taste constitutional ? 
How is conscience constitutional ? How is any one of the 
bodily senses constitutional ? The schoolmen have an- 
swered this as they have answered the other question, by 
saying that conscience is a gift from God. Religious peo- 
ple get over a similar difficulty by preaching and praying 
for a change of heart. The old philosophers went farther 
and very logically, when they made Taste a supernatural 
revelation ; and we retain a fragment of their superstition 
in our popular use of their word Genius, by which they 
understood a veritable divine possession, analogous (but 
opposite) to diabolical possession. But no one has gone 
so far as to make our bodily senses supernatural. ' We let 
the physiologists alone and wait patiently for their newest 
and best descriptions of how these faculties are constitu- 
tional. In like manner we read Paley and Locke, and 
Kant and Conte, and Sir William Hamilton, and Mill and 
Spenser, and all the rest of the psychologists, to get the 
latest and clearest and most consistent views of the con- 
stitutionality of our higher powers, taste or the faculty of 
liking, conscience or the faculty of judging, worship or 
the faculty of serving. Why, then, should we not hear 
Schlegel and William von Humboldt and Max Muller 
describe the latest and best modes of conceiving how lan- 
guage, or the faculty of self-utterance, enters as a har- 
monious part into the human constitution ? 

I say modes, and not mode, of conceiving, because these 
highest philologists are not agreed. There are four 
theories of the way in which a constitutional tendency to 
language in man may work itself out, and produce words, 
or if you please roots, or germs of words. 

Without asking you to take my names as perfectly de- 
scriptive of these four methods, but only .as sufficiently 
suggestive to make my descriptions plain, I will call 
these four ways : — 
, 1. The method by imitation. 

2. The method by interjection. 



166 ON LANGUAGE , [lECT. 

3. The method by sympathy. 

4. The method by invention. 

The first theory of the formation of words, by imitation, 
supposes that men were originally children, or, if you please, 
monkeys with superior vocal organs, capable of reproducing 
all the sounds of nature which fell upon the ear ; and that 
they necessarily called the dog ' bow/ and the cow ' moo/ 
and the sheep ( baa/ before they could discover their pro- 
perties and invent other and higher names. You are 
aware that the ancient grammarians termed the whole 
class of such imitations f onomatopoeic } words, and that 
this term is still in constant use. Our boys are taught at 
school that such words as hiss, rattle, clatter, splash, and 
many others, are natural attempts to make language out of 
the noises of nature. And it is no doubt so. All lan- 
guages have this kind of words. Everybody betakes him- 
self to imitation when he hears a new sound in nature 
which has not before been named.* But, on the other 
hand, it is curious to see how little resemblance exists be- 
tween the names of a natural sound in different languages. 
It is as if the ears of different races heard these sounds 
differently. To understand why, let any one listen to 
some inarticulate sound — for example, the roar of a bull, — 
and observe how circumstances alter its character, — how 
it is one thing when near, and another when far away, — 
how one might think at this moment that it sounded like 
low, at that moment like ho, at another like mm, at a 
fourth as if it had no consonantal beginning, at a fifth as if 
it had a consonantal ending, &c. It is impossible that all 
human language should have arisen from so meagre and so 
indefinite a stock of primary imitations of natural noises. 
To say nothing of the necessary expression of purely 
mental creations — the intransitive verbs to he and to have, 
for instances, — and a hundred other equally aboriginal and 
indispensable words in every language, for which no sound 
in nature ever could have stood as model. 

The second theory, that of interjection, provides for the 

* I have a little cousin three years old who began to call a pencil rex 
(rech), and has continued to do so ever since. I know of no other origin 
for this word than an attempt to imitate the harsh scratch of a slate 
pencil on a slate, although his parents are not aware that it had such an 



VII.] AS A TEST OF RACE. 167 

difficulties which are raised in the way of accepting the. 
theory of imitation. It is supposed by many that the 
rational soul of man struggled into speech, as the Chris- 
tian enters the kingdom of heaven, by violence. That at 
first the communication of man with nature and with his 
fellow man was like that of the animals, and like that of 
idiots, by cries and yells, by groanings and sighings, by 
rude attempts at varied musical notes, by hissings and 
mutterings and murmurs, gradually getting modulations 
of their own, and falling into series under the government 
of the memory and the judgment, as these became culti- 
vated by exercise. Certainly there are interjections in all 
languages, ohs ! and ahs ! for wonder and admiration and 
complaint. But when we compare the interjections of 
different languages, we soon perceive that there exist but 
half-a-dozen which can be called universal, or could serve 
as a starting-point for language. The moment this narrow 
charmed circle is past, all uniformity ceases, and some 
other law of word-making must be supposed to interfere. 
What resemblance, for instance, can be traced between the 
English interjection alas I and its German synonym 
leider ! The English wo ! is the same as the Latin vue ! 
(pronounced wai), but the French helas ! has not the least 
likeness to the Pennsylvania-Dutch autsch ! If there be 
an interjectional common language for mankind, then it 
must be so beclouded by differences in the vocal organs, 
in the passions, and in the mental experiences of the differ- 
ent races, and its root-words must have suffered so much 
change, that all attempts to use it as a guide in ethnology 
must prove futile. At the same time, the interjectional 
efforts of the soul in the direction of language cannot be 
lost sight of in attempting to explain some of the mys- 
teries and curiosities of literature, as I will have occasion 
hereafter to show. And Dr Kraitsir was perhaps nearer 
the truth than many of us imagine, when he taught that 
the native interjections of the voice went forth from the 
mouth under the influence of a genuine entente cordiale, 
or permanent good understanding between, first, the 
body of man and his mind, and secondly, between the 
mind and surrounding nature. 

For the third theory of language, then, I use the term 
sympathy. Dr Kraitsir' s interpretation of it is only one 



168 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 

of several. Other philologists describe it and illustrate it 
in somewhat different ways, but they all come to the 
same thing in the end. Now the nature of this sympa- 
thetic relationship existing between man and nature is 
perfectly mysterious, and we may well be prepared for 
complete mysteries in its vocal manifestations. The first 
formation of language must be a great mystery on any 
theory. But it is a phenomenon no stranger than the 
newborn child's knowing how to suck. When I give you 
one or two illustrations of Dr Kraitsir's views, then you 
will remember how deep into nature these magic influences 
penetrate; and how the automatic adjustment of the 
crystalline lens of the eye to objects of sight according to 
their distance from us, is as inexplicable an act of the 
brain as any automatic adjustment of the tracheae to the 
objects of conversation. 

To see, then, how an act could be expressed in a word, 
let us take for an example the act of going out. What is 
the going to be referred to ? Dr Kraitsir answered : to 
the breath; and what the out ? Answer: to the mouth. If 
now we can make the breath perceptible to the ear, first 
while still within the mouth, and then after it has issued 
from the mouth, and if we can give our auditor a clear idea 
of these two things in connection, we shall have expressed 
' going out. 3 Let us then first make a noise in our throat, 
i. e. pronounce the guttural k ; then let us make a noise of 
wind issuing from our lips, or rather issuing from between 
the tongue and the teeth, i. e. pronounce the sibilant s. 
The word for going out will then be simply the two letters 
Tc-s, pronounced together, lis. This is the actual Latin 
word ex, out of. 

If you wish a more complicated instance, I will give you 
Kraitsir's favourite example, which always made me smile, 
I confess, but which furnishes a very perfect example of 
the mode in which this theory of the sympathetic formation 
of language applies its principles. 

How can we imagine that the human mind would act 
upon the larynx and mouth so as to give an outsider the 
idea of abstract solidity, matter, body ? A body is matter 
in three dimensions, vertical, horizontal forwards, and 
horizontal sideways. Now the organs of speech consist 
chiefly of the throat, the tongue, and the lips ; the first is 



VII.] AS A TEST OF EACE. 169 

vertical, the second horizontal forwards, and the third 
horizontal sideways. If we take, therefore, a guttural, a 
lingual, and a labial, we can with these three sound the 
three dimensions of matter, i. e. express the idea of a body 
in the general. Thus : — K'R'P, corpus, the Latin word for 
body. From this word can now be formed nouns, verbs, 
adjectives, adverbs, &c, expressing modifications of this 
idea of solid body, ad libitem ; such as grip, grab, grave, 
engrave, &c. 

The difficulty in the way of accepting such a system of 
etymology is exactly the objection we feel to letting 
children drive a fast horse, — it will run away with them 
and smash everything to flinders. All the most accom- 
plished philologists of our day, all the patient and success- 
ful investigators into the historical etymologies of words, — ■ 
beginning with Jacob Grimm, the father of the modern science 
of comparative philology, and including such men as Bopp 
and Pott, and Schott, and Kahlgren, and Rochrig, Halde- 
man, Whitney, Max Miiller, Ernest Renan, — set their faces 
dead against what they consider to be only a revival of the 
wild vagaries of the fanciful philologists of past- times, 
from the old Cratylus of Greece to the new Cratylus of 
Oxford, the Evanses, the Pocockes, the Davises, the 
Cannes, and a host of other names, most erudite and in- 
genious people, but working on the old and false system 
of mere analogy, a system which we dare not now return 
to, because it would be subversive of all the laws of 
letter-variation and word-derivation, which have got them- 
selves established and illustrated within the last thirty 
years as fully as any of the laws of physics or natural 
history. 

If you wish to see how the old system of etymologies is 
abhorred and repudiated by the masters of the new system 
of linguistic mutation and derivation, I would refer you to 
the second series of Max Miiller's Lectures on Language. 
He is particularly severe upon the first two theories which 
I have enumerated, — the method by imitation, which he 
calls the f bow-wow theory/ and the method by interjec- 
tion, which he calls the ' pooh-pooh theory/ Speaking of 
the first, or bow-wow theory, he says, ' the onomatopoeic 
theory goes very smoothly as long as it deals with cackling 
hens and quacking ducks; but round that poultry yard 



170 ON LANGUAGE [lECT. 

there is a dead wall, and we soon find that it is behind that 
wall that language really begins/' 

To illustrate the ridiculous excess to which the second 
or pooh-pooh theory may be driven by its ignorant advo- 
cates, he recites from the Honolulu newspaper, the Polyne- 
sian, of 1862, an etymology of the Hawaian word Hooiaioai, 
to testify, viz. from five roots hoo-o-ia-io-ai, meaning causa- 
tion, interjection, pronoun definite, rapid and thorough 
movement resulting in realization and completion, — or in 
English words, make that completely out to be a fact, 
Hooiaioai ; testify to its truth. Nothing could well be more 
ridiculous. And yet our libraries are filled with old 
volumes on language containing literally myriads of etymo- 
logies as ridiculous, and more ridiculous than that. 

To take another class of etymologies, from the list of 
proper names of persons in the Hebrew Scriptures : when 
their compilers explain the change from Abram to Abra- 
ham, by the announcement that he was to be the father of 
many nations, because in the Hebrew of Solomon's day oh, 
rah, and am were the three words for father, many, and 
people, without reference to the fact that his original con- 
nection was with central Asia and its languages, why should 
we accept their etymology? How evidently has the story 
of Sarah's laughter been inserted in the legend of Isaac's 
birth, in order to support the etymology of his name from 
the Hebrew verb to laugh ! The explanation of the name of 
Moses : ' because he was drawn out of the water,' — are we 
to prefer it to that of the monumental Egyptian proper 
name mas, which means a child ? or must we seek still other 
fanciful resemblances to other Egyptian roots ? All such 
etymologies, unsupported by well-known facts, capable of 
comparative investigation, it is a waste of time to quote, 
and a drawback if employed in the study of ancient history. 
The method is a false one, — radically false. 

But let us not be frightened away from our dinner of 
honest mutton chops or noble roast beef because French 
cooks can deceive the traveller with ragouts of cat when 
they call for hare. A Cuvier will eat his cat with great 
nonchalance, and hold up one of the bones to the landlord 
after dinner, remarking with a smile that his hare must 
have been a most singular specimen, having an anatomy 
analogous to the carnivores. 



VII.] AS A TEST OF KACE. 171 

When a transcendental philologue constructs an etymo- 
logy for such a word as bersil, the Hebrew word for iron, 
out of the Hebrew verb peres, to pierce or cut, and a sup- 
posed determinative final letter I meaning through, the 
conclusion is as empirical and unscientific as fanciful and 
untrustworthy, as when the ancient Talmudists derived 
bersil from the initial letters of the names of Jacob's four 
wives, Bilhah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Leah. But when a com- 
parative philologist, obeying the canon of modern science, 
that ' no scripture is of private interpretation,' takes up the 
study of all the names of iron in various languages, and 
as one of a whole group of metals, and perceives, first, that 
when reversed, the Shemite name for iron is the Indo- 
Germanic name for another of the metals, silber ; and 
secondly, that its first syllable, ber, is also represented 
by the Latin word for gold, aur, the German baar, the 
English bullion, the French bague (originally balg, a golden 
ring), and other similar analogues, — and that the second 
syllable, sil, has similar relationships with cesel, chalhos, 
&c, &c. ; he is on the high road to some valuable result, 
which his investigations will be sure to reach if patiently 
and carefully pursued. 

The question is not what etymologists who are ignorant 
of, or indifferent to, Grimm's laws of mutation have done 
with the roots of language ; but the question is, how did 
the roots or germs of language originate ? Miiller himself 
distinguishes between these questions. ' There is one class 
of scholars/ he says, ' who derive all words from roots 
according to the strictest rules of comparative grammar, 
but who look upon the roots, in their original character, as 
either interjectional or onomatopoeic. There are others 
who derive words straight from interjections and the cries of 
animals, and who claim in their etymologies all the liberty 
the cow claims in saying mooh, booh, or ooh, or that man 
claims in saying pooh,fi, pfui. With regard to the former 
theory, I should wish to remain entirely neutral.' It is 
only the latter that he opposes. He does not pretend to 
say how much of the language of the first savages of the 
earth consisted of imitative cries and interjections ; but of 
this he is quite sure, that the historical languages of after 
times obey laws of mental growth and rational arrange- 



172 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 

ment, which are our only guides through the forest of 
etymology. 

Professor Pott even denies that the root-words of lan- 
guages ever were words — spoken words. He thinks that 
they are mere abstractions, obtained by our analysis of 
languages now spoken. He says, if they existed at all in 
early ages, they existed merely as dim, vague, floating, 
formless ideas in the savage brain, and came out in that 
ancient savage speech, sometimes in one form, sometimes 
in another, at the whim of the speaker, or the promptings 
of the moment.* 

But Miiller cannot take so German a view of roots. He 
has imbibed in Oxford too much of the practical genius of 
the English. He leaves the ghosts of words behind him, 
with all the other ghost faith of his fatherland. He thinks 
the ancient roots of words were the first actual words in 
use ; but then, they were used without any grammatical 
definition. ' I think/ says he, ' that there was a stage in 
the growth of language, in which that sharp distinction 
which we make between the different parts of speech had 
not yet been fixed, and when even that fundamental dis- 
tinction between subject and predicate, on which all the 
parts of speech are based, had not yet been realized in its 
fullness, and had not yet received a corresponding outward 
expression/f He refers to languages at the present day in 
this germinal condition. In Chinese, for instance, ly means 
an ox, a plough, and the act of ploughing ; ta means great, 
greatness, and greatly. In Egyptian an'h meant life, living, 
lively, and to live.% Other languages are seen just coming 
out of this first stage into a second, where the root is 
retained, and another root is attached to it to show the 
mental distinctions. In the Polynesian dialects any verb 
may be used unchanged as a noun or adjective, by adding 
kua, or particles of affirmation, and ho, or particles of the 
agent. § In our own English we speak in the same way; 
we say make, mahe-r, mahe-ing. Miiller gives a still more 
striking illustration from the language of children^ that 

* Etymolog. forschungen, ii. 95, in Miiller, p. 95. 
f Second Series of Lectures, p. 95. 
% Bunsen's Egypt, i. 324, in same. 
§ Hale, p. 263, in same. 



VII.] AS A TEST OF RACE. 173 

world of perennial savagery, tliafc fountain of antiquity 
welling up for ever at our feet. And let me'here assure 
you that some of the finest laws of comparative language 
have been discovered by watching the speech of children. 
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings He hath ordained 
praise. And he who thinks that he can settle the laws of 
morality, or of reason, or of language, without the closest 
and most patient investigation of infants and young people, 
will never become a master in any of the schools of the 
future, — of that he may rest well assured. 

What, then, is the process of forming word-roots in the 
mouth of children ? A child says ' up ! up ! 9 meaning, 1 1 
want to get up on my mother's lap/ In his mind noun, 
verb, adjective are completely confounded and form an 
ideal unit. It will be months or years before he can 
separate the subjective I from the objective mother's lap, 
or the want from the action of getting up into it. 

But, after all, we do not get an idea of the origin of this 
word up, which stands for so much. Our children take it 
from ourselves. We got it from our English ancestors ; 
they from their Saxon forbears. How far back it can be 
traced we do not know. We know of no sound in nature 
of which it could have been an imitation. We know of no 
explosion of feeling to produce such an interjection. It 
would be hard for Dr Kraitsir to devise a spiritual explana- 
tion of its sympathy with what it represents, whether as 
up, upward, or upon ; and if he could, the explanation would 
not stand good for its correspondeuces in other languages, 
such as auf in German, su in Italian, or avu> in Greek.* 
And what is true of this word is true of all other unimita- 
tive and uninterjectional roots, the world round, and the 
ages through. 

Have we no explanation, then, for the origin of the great 
body of aboriginal root-words, and for the numerous pri- 
mary monosyllables which we use every day? I must re- 
peat what I said at the beginning of this lecture, that the 

* The sound of up {ab, pronounced ap) is employed by the Germans 
to express the very opposite sense of down. The French have no word 
at all corresponding to the English tip, for their en haut is the English on 
high; and their sus is never used but in composition. That curious ex- 
ample of ' polar meaniugs,' au dessus and au dessous, is repeated in a wholly 
different form in the German auf and ab. 



174 ON LANGUAGE [lECT. 

science of language is in its infancy. But still we are not 
wholly helpless. You remember that I enumerated four 
theories of the origin of words ; but I have described only 
three thus far : the method by interjection, the method by 
imitation, and the method by sympathy. ■ Each of these 
methods are available for some words ; and the method by 
sympathy plays an important part in the construction of 
large sections of the historical languages, as I may perhaps 
make clear hereafter, in discussing the formation of the 
alphabet; But I must now describe to you the fourth 
theory, or the method by invention. 

It is denied by many philologists that a new word is ever 
invented. If by this be meant out of the head, as we say, 
that is, without any reference to existing words and things, 
it may possibly be true, although I doubt it. But if it be 
meant that no new words have ever been deliberately con- 
structed and put into circulation by intelligent human be- 
ings, words which had no connection with the organic 
development of language, I think that all human experi- 
ence, certainly all literary history, proves the contrary. 
Nay, I think that I can show that the majority of the words 
now used by civilized people are inventions, or modifications 
of purely invented words . Nay more — and this is the princi- 
pal thought which I wish this lecture to leave impressed 
upon your minds — there is a vast, a dominant element in 
language which I call the bardic element, because it con- 
sists of words invented by. bards (poet-historians and poet- 
priests of old times), by druids, if you like that title better, — 
an element which has superseded and overgrown the more 
ancient and savage elements of language, just as the oak 
forests of the Bronze age superseded the pine forests of 
the Stone age, and as the beech woods of the Iron age 
superseded the oak forests of the Bronze age — an element 
produced by the cultivation of the civilized intellect ; an 
element of religious, moral, and social terminology, which 
now forms the chief and almost the sole bond of communion 
between the various languages of the earth. And philolo- 
gists have so far ignored, despised, or overlooked this ele- 
ment, as to throw, as I have said, a profound shadow over 
the early history of man, and a well-entertained suspicion 
upon the best conclusions, not only of linguistic ethnology, 



VII.] AS A TEST OF RACE. 175 

but of their own science of comparative grammar itself.* 
I shall attempt nothing more this evening than to illus- 
trate these assertions, trusting to the incidental topics of 
the remaining lectures of my course for something like a 
reasonable demonstration. 

The great effort of linguistic science has been to prove 
that the present races of men came from one original race, 
by showing how all languages now spoken by these races 
can be traced back to root-words which must be supposed 
to have formed one original language. I have already 
said how many difficulties start up in the way of any such 
showing, and how little prepared our system of linguistic 
principles are for such an undertaking. But furthermore, 
language is the utterance of man's spiritual nature. It 
must therefore be commensurate with that nature. It must 
vary as that nature varies. It must grow with its growth. 
We see the process of development of language parallel 
with the development of mind in every child. Every child 
drops the first language it has learned to speak and takes 
a new and better language suited to its advancing years. 
Again, the language of the boy is exchanged afterwards for 
the language of the man, when observation, reading, and so- 
ciety have enlarged the mind still farther. f See how the 
turgid style of the poetic youth disappears before the solid 
matter-of-fact style of the man of business. See how the 
Johnsonian polysyllabic Latinism of five-and-twenty gives 
place to the nervous Saxon monosyllables of fifty. How 
smooth and fluent are Carlisle's first pages ! how harsh and 
unreadable his later books ! On the other hand, see Edmund 
Burke give up his chaste and simple early English for 
flowery and fantastic periods in his later years. All lan- 
guage is a daguerreotype of the soul. It is inconceivable 
that the men of the Bronze age, even if they were lineal 
descendants (which they probably were not) of the nien of 

* Prof. Whitney, in his lectures on Linguistic Science delivered at the 
Smithsonian Institution, in March, 1864, says, ' It has quite recently been 
found that language is the principal means' of ethnological investigation, 
of tracing out the deeds and fates of men during thepre-historic ages,' &c. 
All this ought to be true, but it is not yet true. 

f The boy swears in Basque, by Jingo ! (Jinco, Basque for God), and the 
man in Greek, by Jove ! * 



176 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 

tlie Stone age, could have spoken the same language with 
that of their ancestors. Later civilizations must have in- 
stituted still different languages. All language is in a 
state of flux. Savage languages, as has been often asserted, 
change rapidly from generation to generation. Our north- 
west Indians, we have been assured, could not comprehend 
their great grandfathers if now alive, and hardly their own 
grandfathers.* Nothing but writing down a language 
can save it from destruction. Nay, that will not do it'. 
The Hebrew is gone ; the Sanscrit is gone ; the ancient 
Syriac is gone; the Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian are 
all gone ; and all we know of these mammoths of past mind, 
we learn only from scattered fragments of them fossil- 
ized in parchment or in stone. Look at the changes which 
English has sustained since Magna Chartawas engrossed. 
) Nothing but printing will save a language from decay. 
Stop the growth or prevent the change of mind, and you 
can stop the growth and prevent the change of language. 
Printing does this in part. Printing fossilizes mind. The 
newspaper is an epidemic of paralysis. When 30,000,000 
of people wake up in the morning together, sit down to 
their breakfast at the same hour, call for 5,000,000 of copies 
of the same column of telegraphic despatch-news printed 
over-night, and one half of them make their remarks upon 
the news in the same democratic terms, and the other half 
in the same aristocratic terms, the good God has arrived 
at the end of his individual creations. Individuality is 
gone. One language at least is fixed. 

Now, if in all times this law of the growth and change 
of language in dependance upon the elevation of man's 
life out of savagery by civilization, and of the development 
of his intellect by culture, has been in action, how absurd 
is it for philologists to suppose that they can recover, by 
the examination of either present grammars or present 
vocabularies, the primeval languages of the Stone age; or 
determine the alliances of pre-historic tribes ; or trace the 
migrations and intermixtures of these tribes from one side 
to the other of the globe ! All those primeval languages 
are buried up, deep underneath a mass of pre-historic lan- 

* This was positively denied, however, by one of the first missionaries 
of the Hudson Bay stations, who told me he formulated the northern 
languages, and found them rich and harmonious and almost invariable. 



VII.] AS A TEST OF EACE. 177 

guages, which in their turn have been overlaid -by the 
old historic tongues, which in their turn have been over- 
laid by the dialects now spoken. As well might the geo- 
logist expect to make out the lithology and structure of 
that inaccessible primeval crust which we must believe to 
exist beneath the Laurentian system the base of which we 
have never yet seen. As well might he expect to study 
the old Silurian and Devonian limestone, slate, and sand 
deposits by analyzing the cretaceous and tertiary marls 
and clays which have succeeded and replaced them in the 
present surface. The philologist is even worse off than the 
geologist ; for there are no Laurentian, or Huronian, or 
Silurian mountains of language, outcropping from and 
overhanging the more modern tide-water plains of literary 
history. The oldest language we have any chance to study 
is the Egyptian, a language of only 8000 years' standing, J 
and therefore, in geological phrase, a quaternary deposit be- 
longing to the present order of things, a language already 
civilized, full of the terms of home and farm life, capable 
of moral and religious expressions, and so nearly akin to 
English in its staple that I might have taken from it my 
illustration of the word f up/ a few minutes ago, instead 
of from the English, for the Egyptian word was ' ap ! 3 

When Professor Whitney therefore — one of the best 
philologists of the new school now living, and an honour, 
as he certainly is, to the science of comparative grammar — 
asserts, as he did in his Smithsonian lectures of last year, 
c that it has been recently found that language is the prin- 
cipal means of ethnological investigation, of tracing out the 
deeds and fates of men during the pre-historic ages/ I 
demur emphatically to the allegation. I do not believe it. 
Unless by pre-historic ages he means merely the ages which 
immediately preceded the opening of monumental and lite- 
rary history ; unless he is willing to exclude entirely from 
the discussion that immense, back-stretching line of ages ; 
during which the human races were unlettered, unhistoric, \ 
uncivilized, and undevout, all record of which is lost beyond 
redemption by philology, and only to be recovered as a 
part of the geological history of the earth and its inhabit- 
ants by the combined efforts of the geologists, the palse- 
ontologists, zoologists, and archaeologists, who have it 
entirely and justly in their charge. The philologists have 

12 



178 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 

nothing whatever as yet to do with it. Nor will they have, 
until among the fossil remains of primeval men some trace 
of letters shall be discovered. If, for instance, bones in 
some Poitou cave be really found scratched with Sanscrit 
letters, then let philologists step in and join the conclave. 
But even then language will not be, as Professor Whitney 
says, ( the principal means of ethnological investigation.'' 

The great mistake made by the new school of linguistics 
is in supposing that there is no fourth theory of language; 
no fourth way in which words originated : viz. by actual 
invention ; no part of language which encrusts and conceals 
the organic structure. The fact is, mankind may be 
divided into two parts, like the body and its skin. Rich- 
ardson says that the characters in his splendid old novel of 
' Sir Charles Grandison - ' are men, women, and Italians. 
History says that the characters in its drama of human life 
are men, women, and priests. Philologists of Professor 
Whitney's school busy themselves entirely about the men 
and women, but forget all about the priests. 

There is a language peculiar to every bird and beast. 
There was a language peculiar to every human race. 
There is a dialect characteristic of each village, township, 
city, province of each nation, of each tribe of men now 
living. These are great studies for the philologist. 
They can be separately analyzed, and they can be com- 
pared together. Their individual histories can be worked 
out to a certain distance back, as far as there are any 
literary records. They can be grouped, and to a certain 
extent — a very moderate extent — classified. They even 
afford stuff for most ingenious and perfectly scientific and 
trustworthy conclusions, such as Grimm's laws of mutation 
and derivation. But they will not make of the philologist 
a trustworthy ethnologist. Why ? 

Because there is something else which he forgets to 
study, which he refuses to believe in. There is a language 
of 'priests. Because this language of priestcraft exists in 
among local dialects and national languages. Nay, be- 
cause it is so interfused with them as to form a component 
part of their constitution. Every language of modern 
times is stamped with this priest-language all over on the 
outside, is full of it inside, in its flesh and in the marrow 
of its bones. No anatomical preparation to be seen in a 



VII.] AS A TEST OF RACE. 179 

museum is more completely streaked and analyzed to the 
eye, by the red substance of injection, than is the English, 
the French, the Arabic, the Hindu, the Zingali, the Bur- 
mese, the Japanese, the Tasmanian, injected and confused 
with a priestly language to the eye of the philologist who 
will consent to recognize its existence. 

What this priestly language is, and how it seems to 
have originated, and why it is thus disseminated through 
all the various languages which are spoken by the various 
races of mankind, I shall endeavour to explain in my next 
two lectures on architecture, and on the alphabet. But 
you will agree with me, that, if such an element can be 
proved to exist in various languages, it must have the 
effect of greatly confusing and mystifying philologists who 
ignore its existence. And still more, if this element, com- 
mon, to many languages, is in fact the principal or pre- 
dominant one of the elements which constitute their 
vocabularies, you can imagine how it must obliterate the 
original distinctions between languages, and render the 
task of tracing the descent of races and their migrations 
previous to the introduction of this priestcraft, almost if 
not entirely hopeless. 

Here I should properly end the lecture of this evening ; 
but a few words, before we part, on the classification of 
languages found in the books. The text books of philology 
distinguish languages as of three kinds: — 1. The mono- 
syllabic, 2. The agglutinate, and, 3. The inflected. 

The first kind are those which speak each word-root by 
itself, preceded and followed by other word-roots, each 
carrying its own idea in full, and leaving the hearer to find 
out the grammatical relation between them by his own 
wits, or by some accent or emphasis or musical modulation 
of the speaker's voice. The specimen of this kind usually 
given is the Chinese. 

The second or agglutinate varieties of language combine 
the monosyllables which grammatically belong together 
into polysyllabic words, like the Saxon words for-bear, 
cart-horse, and into fixed grammatical idioms like to be, to 
do, to insist, according unto, &c. And this process can be 
carried on to any extent. Words which have been com- 
pounded of three or four words can be contracted to 
monosyllables and then compounded anew, as an economi- 



180 ON LANGUAGE [LECT. 

cal family can live three days on a single round of beef, by 
rehashing it with other portions of their meals, from day 
to day. I may find occasion to illustrate this boiling-down 
and cooking-up • process in language hereafter. Its phe- 
nomena are very curious and instructive. 

The third class of languages, the inflected, are so called 
because their words are not served up pure and simple, 
alone or in courses, but garnished with prefixes and affixes, 
which are as variable as Soyer's recipes. The old gram- 
marians called these variations ' cases,' or fallings-off from 
the upright simplicity of the word-root; and they gave 
names to these cases, nominative, genitive, dative, &c, for 
the purpose (apparently) of rendering it as difficult as pos- 
sible for the grammar-school boys of Boston to pass their 
examination at Harvard. Our own grammatical grand- 
fathers, in their wisdom, saw fit to transplant that bar- 
barous Greek paradism into an English soil, where nothing 
but the hop-pole support of the birch rod has ever availed to 
keep it in sickly existence. Yet we still teach our wonder- 
ing babes to poll-parrot ' nominative, a man/ e genitive, of 
a man/ c dative, to a man/ ' accusative, a man/ ' vocative, 
oh man ! 9 ' ablative — non est inventus ' — although the whole 
genius of our language, which belongs to the second or 
agglutinate class, cries shame so audibly that the babes 
themselves have heard it. English ' cases ! } there are no 
such things ! In Latin and Hebrew and Sanscrit inflec- 
tional forms have been dread realities. How such a bur- 
den could have been borne by the educated classes at 
Rome and Athens and Jerusalem it is hard to compre- 
hend. Some philologues have doubted that the Latin of 
\ the schools ever got spoken by any class below Hortensius 
and Cicero. But when we turn to our North American 
Indians and see how complicated the grammatical com- 
binations and inflections of their dialects have been, we 
may believe that the very shepherds of Ephraim knew how 
to use the seven forms of the Hebrew verb — kal, he cuts ; 
niphal, he is cut ; piel, he cuts hard ; pual, he is cut hard ; 
hiphil, he causes to cut; hophal, he is made to cut; and 
hithpael, he cuts himself — as glibly as the oldest rabbi of 
the Bagdad or Tiberias schools. In fact, there is no limit 
to the ability of an educated boy, in the direction in which 
that education goes. Some of the most difficult languages, 



VII.] AS A TEST OF KACE. 181 

completely artificial, and admirably adapted for ' variety 
and precision in their use, are the languages of savage 
tribes existing at the present day. There is no good 
reason therefore for denying that the most ancient men of 
the oldest Stone periods had languages as complicated and 
as inflectional as any now known to exist, and with a 
vocabulary commensurate with the variety of things by 
which they were surrounded, and of actions which their 
life gave birth to. 

It is not to be admitted for a moment, that we must 
trace back the existing languages to their word-roots, and 
suppose these word-roots to have constituted the early 
language or languages of man. We have no liberty to 
suppose that the earliest languages were monosyllabic. 
As I have said before, it is not at all established that lan- 
guages become monosyllabic as we trace them backward. 
On the contrary, there are many things to show that the 
tendency of all languages is to grow more and more mono- 
syllabic in the course of time, that is, in the direction 
towards our day, not backward towards the beginning. It 
is not proved that ' China and Further India/ as Prof. 
Whitney, and many others with him maintain, ( are occu- 
pied by races whose languages are monosyllabic because 
they have never grown out of that original stage in which 
In do- Germanic speech had its beginning.-' * The great 
Orientalist, Abel Remusat, even refuses to admit that the 
Chinese is entirely a monosyllabic tongue, and instances 
such compound words as tsiang-jin, workman (Zimmer- 
mann), and tsehung-sse, bell-master, to justify his doubts. 
Beste shows that there are only 100 real monosyllabic 
words out of 8000 which the Chinese scholars use ; and 
although he thinks that the old Chinese was monosyllabic, 
he shows that the modern has 15 kinds of composition. 
Ampere condemns the doctrine of Chinese monosyllabism 
based merely on the ground of single characters. Abel 
Remusat shows how the Chinese terminal -jan in adjectives 
is exactly equivalent to the terminations -ment in French 
(from mens, mentis), and -Uch in German. Plath explains 
how early introduction of Chinese monosyllabic writing 
prevented the rise of grammatical inflexions ; and while 
maintaining that the meanings of affixes remain apparent, 
* P. Ill, Smith Rep., 1863. 



182 ON LANGUAGE AS A TEST OP EACE. 

gives many instances of one root retaining many meanings, 
instead of receiving new meanings by affixes.* 

I have shown in a paper read before the American Phi- 
losophical Society of Philadelphia not long ago, and pub- 
lished in their Proceedings, that when one classifies the 
names which have been given, by people speaking many 
different dialects and languages, to some one common and 
familiar and unmistakable object in nature, such as wind, 
or fire, or a stone, or the human head, or hand, this remark- 
able result is obtained : namely, that every organic utter- 
ance and shade of utterance possible to the human organs 
of speech, labial, lingual, dental, nasal, and guttural, has 
been employed to express the self- same object. I pursued 
the inquiry only through two or three hundred of the 
several thousand dialects and languages of the present or 
comparatively modern days ; and yet in this small and 
hap-hazard collection it is perfectly apparent, that while in 
one country an object may be called ha, in another it will 
be called da, in a third la, in a fourth na, in a fifth ga ; in 
others ap, at, ar, an, ah ; in others hour, or dar, or lar, or 
nar, or gar ; in others dah, or nal, or pad, or lag ; in others 
other combinations of these elements will be in use, in the 
form of a simple monosyllable ; in others a more complicated 
system of dissyllables or trissyllables will exist ; and here 
and there long words will have grown up out of one or other 
of the original simple elemental organic sounds ; — and all 
these forms are in existence and in daily use in one age; 
and all these numerous modifications of utterly diverse 
lingual elements are in constant employment to express 
one thing, and that one thing a simple, unmistakable ob- 
ject of nature, affecting the senses of all mankind alike. 

I will close this lecture, then, by stating again, and upon 
this new basis, my conviction that most of the generaliza- 
tions of the science of Comparative Philology — those which 
take hold of all the larger problems of human history, the 
origin of languages, the migrations of nations, the diversity 
of races, the development of mythologies — are as yet grand 
failures ; and that a much more thorough-going method, a 
much profounder synthesis of facts, is needed to lead us to 
the desired end of our researches in this field. 

* See his theory at the bottom of page 216, Sitzimgbe : R. Bair., Acad. 
1861, II. iii., and top of p. 217. On the Tone Speech of the old Chinese 
with two pages of radicals, 161 in number (p. 212). 



183 



LECTURE VIII. 

THE OBIGIN OF ARCHITECTURE. 

The Fine Arts preceded Belles Lettres in the order of 
time as well as in the order of a philosophical classification 
of the Intellectual Sciences. Men knew how to build be- 
fore they knew how to v/rite. You may be surprised that 
I interpolate this lecture on Architecture, between my last 
lecture on Language and my next lecture on Literature. 
But I follow the order of nature. The soul of man en- 
dowed with language utters itself first in sculpture and 
painting, then in literature, then in moral and beneficent 
deeds, and finally in acts of worship, — successively em- 
ploying higher and higher faculties upon better and nobler 
materials, In the first stages of his savage existence man 
wasted most of his time and energies waiting on nature ; 
watching patiently for the rise of a trout, or for the 
approach of a deer. Much of this time was whiled away 
in reverie. The hunter lived an inner life of mere per- 
ception; a continual stream of paltry observations flowed 
through him, having merely leaves and twigs, spiders and 
butterflies, occasional startings of bird and beast and 
glimpses of the outside sky and distant landscape, for 
their only objects. This was no miserable life ! It would 
be maligning the Divine Creating Charity to suppose it. 
It is the life of all animals — and they are all happy. So 
were the early races of mankind. So are all men yet. 
Come we to speak of Happiness, we speak of that which 
God has made universal. It is a synonym for Life. 
Therefore we call God good. And the young man who 
leaves Harvard or Yale to tramp through the woods of the 
Alleghanies with a transit over his shoulder, or a level-rod 
in his hand, will soon learn how happy his first ancestors 
must commonly have been ; and why the grave and me- 



184 THE OKIGEST OE [LECT. 

lancholy Indians (as we call them, in our ignorance) are so 
full of fun and frolic at all times when not subdued by 
hunger, fear, or drunkenness. 

Now, the first and most natural and easy language of 
this animal happiness, after gesticulation, is sculpture. 
Hence all active savages amuse themselves with whittling. 
Witness all our boys, and all the grown-up boys of our 
Western country. The practice has been universal to all 
races, through all ages, from the beginning. It is the 
origin of sculpture, which in its turn made literature pos- 
sible ; for one of the oldest forms of writing which we 
know, the Irish Ogham character, was whittled out on 
sticks ; and the early Egyptian characters were cut in 
stone. The tendency to employ the hands while the body 
rests is greater in cold climates than in hot ones ; and 
therefore we should expect to find earlier traces of sculp- 
ture in the temperate zones. But sculpture is absolutely 
universal, and commenced with the appearance of man 
upon the earth.* 

The earliest traces of it which we have (as yet) dis- 
covered, are on the scratched bones of the diluvium and 

* The ingenious author of Essai sur lTnegalite des Races Humaines, 
M. A. de Gobineau (Paris, 1853, Phil. Lib., vol. i. p. 356), has a theory that 
the artistic genius was equally foreign to the natures of the three great 
type races, yellow, white, and black, into which he divides mankind ; and 
that it did not make its appearance until the white and black race mingled. 
' Thus, also, by the birth of the Malay variety there sprang from the yel- 
low and black races a family more intelligent than its double parentage ; 
and again, from the alliance of the yellow and the' white there issued 
means very superior to the populations purely Finnish, as well as to the 
Melanian tribes. I do not deny it,' he continues, ' these are good results. 
The world of arts and noble literature result from mixtures of blood, in- 
ferior races ameliorated, ennobled : these are marvels to applaud. The 
small are elevated. But, alas, the great at the same time are abased, and 
this is an irreparable ill not to be compensated. Prom the mixture of 
race come also refinements of manners, ideas, faiths, especially sweetenings 
of the passions and desires. Put these are transitory benefits ; and if I 
must recognize the fact that the mulatto, of whom one can make a lawyer, 
doctor, merchant, is better than his negro grandfather, wholly uncultivated 
and good for nought, I must avow also that the Bramans of primitive 
India, the heroes of the Iliad, and those of the Schahnameh, the warriors 
of Scandinavia, all phantoms so glorious of races the most beautiful long 
since vanished, offering an image of humanity more brilliant and more 
noble, were especially the agents of civilization and grandeur more active, 
more intelligent, more sure than the mixed peoples, mixed one hundred 
times of the present epoch, and yet already they were not pure. 5 



VIII. J ARCHITECTURE-. 185 

the cave-mud deposits. Many of these are merely marks 
left by the flint tools with which the savages removed the 
flesh from the surface of the bone, but some are indubi- 
tably patterns of the fancy, scratched in that dolce far 
niente mood in which a savage digests his dinner. Some 
are actually cut into imitative shapes. The most interest- 
ing specimens of Stone-age art which I have ever seen are 
those of roots preserved in the cabinet of M. Boucher des 
Perthes at Abbeville.* They were found in the peat-bogs of 
the river-bottom, and are therefore of less extreme an- 
tiquity than the flint instruments of the diluvium. But 
they are old enough, heaven knows ! and very curious. 
They are in the form sometimes of men, with straddling 
legs and arms ; sometimes of ducks, or snakes, or frogs. 
But whatever shape it may be, some artificial addition has 
been made to it, by the joking savage, to increase its like- 
liness, and to express his appreciation of its oddity, or per- 
haps we ought to add, in his eyes, to its beauty. For 
when we see how evidently, how inexpressibly lovely, to 
the enthusiastic little mother-heart of one of our baby 
daughters, her dirty, black, old, hideous doll can be, we 
may believe that, to the art sentiment just sown and hardly 
yet sprouting in those aboriginal savage souls, a black 
forked eSigy of humanity, with the addition of a cut with 
a flint knife for a mouth, and a peck on each side of its 
head for two eyes, would represent Venus the goddess of 
loveliness, if not indeed Jupiter the awful thunderer. 
There is a good deal of accounting for tastes — when we 
consider circumstances. 

The next stage in sculpture was, probably, imitations in 
stone of the marks of wet feet and hands. These would 
first be made at river fordings, and afterwards on the tops 
of look-out mountains. Such sculpturings are described 
in books of travels all over the world. The savage crosses 
a stream by swimming, and dries his dripping body on 
some sun-lit rock. Then he waits for his companions, or 
for his prey, or for his enemy. Meanwhile he pecks away 
at one of the damp footsteps on the rock/ Others notice 
what he has left undone, and finish it. The footprint 
becomes a permanent landmark. Some battle there in 

* The sculptured bcnes of the caves of the Dordogne had nGt been 
found when this was written. 



186 THE OEIGIN OF [lECT. 

subsequent days shall make it famous. Some deified hero 
shall be propitiated there by sacrifices. The footprint 
becomes a symbol of worship. You have all heard of the 
two footprints sculptured on the summit of Mount Olivet, 
and worshipped by pilgrims, as the marks left when Jesus 
sprang into the sky at his ascension. There is another 
footprint of Jesus preserved on a stone in the Mosque of 
Omar, at the extremity of the eastern aisle.* At Poitiers, 
in France, the traveller may see two footprints of the Lord, 
upon a slab enshrined in the south wall of the church of St 
Kadigonde, made when he stood before her to inform her 
of her coming martyrdom. 

The prints of the two feet of Ishmael are preserved on a 
stone in the temple of Mecca, which tradition says was the 
threshold of the palace of his father-in-law, the king of the 
Dhorhamides.f Others say that they are the prints of his 
father Abraham's feet, when IshmaeFs termagant wife 
drove the old patriarch away from the threshold of her 
husband's house. 

On the top of the highest mountain in Ceylon are the 
prints of Adam's feet. There are two immense foot- 
prints, 200 feet apart, on the rocks of Magdesprung, a 
village in the Hartz mountains of Germany, which tradition 
says were made when a huge giantess leaped down from 
the clouds to save one of her beautiful maidens from the 
violence of a baron of the olden times. J The holiest object 
in the great temple of Burmah is the so-called footprint of 
Gaudama, seven feet long, divided into compartments, and 
sculptured in an extraordinary manner in the fashion of an 
astrological charm. 

My purpose is not to lead you into the dark chambers of 
heathen imagery. I might not be able to explain at all to 
vour satisfaction this disposition of the human race to 
worship the human foot and everything belonging to it, 
though I have my theory for it. We will stick to our 
subject, which is sculpture and its origin. 

But I wish I could transport this audience to a moun- 
tain top, where I stood one day last spring, and show them 
a specimen of savage sculpture of the most primeval type. 

* E. 33, 21, 4 index. 

f Weil's Legends of Mohammed, 36, 23 h. $ 32, 2. 



VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 187 

It is a broad-backed, flat-topped mountain in western 
Pennsylvania, the westernmost of those which compose 
the Alleghanies. It is cleft from summit to base, a depth 
of 1300 feet, by a narrow gorge through which flows, roar- 
ing on towards the west to join the Ohio, one of the 
fairest rivers in the world, the Youghioghany. On the 
southern brow of this gorge, looking down fearfully into 
it, and also looking broadly out over all the western 
country, with a sweep of horizon taking in the blue 
distance of the Pittsburg hills, there is a table of bare 
sandstone rock. The people call it, as the Indians did 
before them, the Cows' rock. The road runs over it ; and 
the tracks of wheels are scratched upon it. But ages 
before old Heckew elder's daughter was born, the first 
white child west of the Alleghany mountains, the Indian's 
trail went over this same rock. And here the red men, 
weary with the hot and long ascent, rested themselves ; 
pitched pebbles down into the abyss of the river gorge, 
and looked out over the illimitable forests of Westmoreland 
county, to catch the distant smoke of the fires of their 
tribes. And while they sat, they cut those fanciful figures 
in the face of the rock which still remain, half obliterated 
by the wheels of the white man's waggons, but still kept 
clean by the rains. There you may see the cloven foot of 
cows or buffalo, and human feet, and three-toed marks of 
birds, like Deane's and Hitchcock's ornothichnites, and 
waviug snakes, and others not so easy to decipher. I went 
to see the place, hoping that the imagination of the farmers 
had misled them, and that the works would prove to be 
the casts of fossils ; but there was no mistaking their arti- 
ficial character.* 

In the same way the human hand is stamped and cut 
upon a thousand cliffs, and on the walls of temples. It was 
a favourite subject of art in Central America. You know 
it was used by the Eoman legions as a sacred standard. 

* Similar, more numerous, and more perfectly executed rock sculptur- 
ings, covering the stoss sides and backs of some granite islets, in the bed 
of the Susquehanna river, at Safe Harbour, below Columbia, in Pennsyl- 
vania, have been photographed and described, from plaster casts taken of 
them by Prof. Thomas Porter, the president, and other members of the 
Linnean Society, at Lancaster, and published recently in the Proceedings 
of the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia. 



188 THE ORIGIN OP [lECT. 

The two hands of man were his two great gods, his pro- 
viders, his defenders. In the Thracian mythology they 
were the Cabiri, the great gods workers, and their children 
were the ten dactyloi, or fingers. Then, when men in old 
times grew tired' of worshipping their own hands, they 
began to worship the uplifted hand of the bard-priest 
blessing them, and of the bard-baron crushing them. 
Afterwards its beauty seized upon the aesthetic sense of the 
artist, and men drew it and sculptured it for its own sake, 
rather than for what it had accomplished. When the pope 
sent a commission to Michael Angelo to examine his 
ability, he refused to be examined; but, seizing a piece of 
chalk, he drew a human hand so boldly and with such 
grace and such expression that no further question could 
be asked ; and so he built St Peter's.* Finally science 
drew the hand, and proved by it, in a Bridgewater Treatise, 
that there must be an all-wise and beneficent Creator. 

Such is the history of all the fine arts. — There is an 
insensible graduation of art for imitation into art for 
ornament. The tools of one age become the amulets of a 
succeeding age ; as in the case of the Swiss flints. The 
phallus found in the Poitou cave was either an idol or an 
amulet. The ladies of Eome wore such as breastpins in 
the Augustan age. The miniature hand lies as a paper- 
weight on modern tables, and as a tablet on the wristlace 
of our ladies. The selection of odd forms of roots by the 
people of the Abbeville bogs is paralleled by the selection 
of bizarre laurel-root walking-sticks by modern young men. 
And the same love of the rare and beautiful, which sets so 
high a value on the emerald and diamond now, caused the 
Stone age savage to string together round his neck the 
floating bits of amber which he saw, and to perforate and 
hang about his loins beautiful small shells. The same 
feelings induced the Druid warrior to wrap a golden torque 
around his arm, that induces an underbred American to 
set three California nuggets in his shirtstuds.f The per- 
petual search for proper and perfect slingstones must have 
cultivated to the highest pitch, and at the earliest periods, 
man's faculty for form and colour in the materials of art. 

* See the story in detail, in Grimm's Life of Michael Angelo, Buimet's 
translation, vol. 'i. pp. 158—160. (Littell and Brown, Boston, 1865.) 
f For the early use of gold see Appendix to Lecture VIII. 



VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 189 

Some of the works of savages strike us with astonishment, 
such as the perforation of the precious stones by the in- 
habitants of Central America. But we must remember 
that the savage was never in a hurry ; time was not money 
then ; and what was made was kept and valued long. The 
ivory work of the Chinese is quite as wonderful. 

But why should we waste time with the earlier stages of 
man's effort to express his appreciation of the forms of 
nature ? We have in architecture the summation of all his 
efforts ; the trial of his matured powers ; the efflorescence 
not only of his taste for form and colour, but of his sense of 
grandeur and sublimity, of his ideas of the invisible powers 
by which he is surrounded, and of his hopes of future hap- 
piness. 

I wish to confine this lecture chiefly to a discussion of 
the rise and meaning of ancient architecture. And I shall 
use the term architecture in its most ancient and not in its 
more modern sense. No two meanings attached to the 
same word could well be more different. To the imagina- 
tion of a man of the 19th century the word architecture 
conjures up a splendid vista of roofs and towers, with 
battlements or spires, castles and churches, palaces and 
stores with marble fronts and decorated windows from the 
pavement to the eve ; parliament houses and city halls, in 
parks laid out for public recreation ; hotels of a thousand 
separate rooms ; vast railway stations, each blocking up 
the end of some wide avenue, one exit of the city, with 
long hanging vaults of wood and iron, under which inter- 
minable trains of cars may load and unload thousands of 
travellers ; factories, mountainous piles of furnace-stack 
and hollow archways, girt with gigantic flues and capped 
with curious brickwork, black iron cylinders vomiting fire, 
and taller chimneys smoking in the upper air; bridges 
like spider-webs, and viaducts with wonderful arcades, 
spanning the streams ; observatories crowned with domes 
like eastern mosques ; theatres and halls for music, with 
organs, seeming like the slumbering winds of Eolus, wait- 
ing to rouse the world ; great, many-storied public schools, 
each with its tide of life ebbing and flowing with tumultu- 
ous regularity four times each day, as if they were the 
ventricles of a great nation's heart : all these and innumer- 
able private residences and villas urban and suburban, in 



190 THE ORIGIN OF [LECT. 

streets, on hill-tops, and beside the shore, or buried in 
sweet vales ; all these combine to make up architecture 
now. 

In ancient times it was not so. The so-called ancients, 
Greeks and Romans of the times of Christ, only 2000 years 
ago, they had their architects for triumphal arches, aque- 
ducts, bridges, forts and palaces, as well as for religious 
shrines. Even the Assyrians and Babylonians, of an age a 
thousand years earlier, built palaces as well as temples ; if 
their palaces were not indeed their only temples, as their 
kings were named after and worshipped for their gods. 
But in the real old ancient times, preceding all those really 
modern or grandly mediaeval histories, I mean the times 
of ancient Egypt, the times when British Stonehenge, and 
the Armorican Carnak, and the North African cromlechs, 
and the Cyclopean walls of Italy and Greece were built ; 
in those old days there was nothing but religious architec- 
ture. The people lived in tents or cottages. Their kings 
were merely chieftains, heads of tribes, living among 
their people like Arab sheiks, or like the kings in Western 
Africa. How many ages from the beginning passed before 
the building of temples began, we cannot know. All be- 
fore the rise of architecture was an age of unconscious art, 
mixed with uncertain superstitions ; an age of fetichism, 
with its vulgar sorceries, like those which form the sole 
religious ceremonies of our Esquimaux ; and with its rude 
stone idols, wooden painted posts, sacred trees, haunted 
mounds, and amulets. 

The original root of all architecture can be found in the 
sepulchral mound. The Druid barrow or the Tartar tumu- 
lus, became first the pyramid, then the propylon of the 
Egyptian temple, then the pagoda of India and China, and 
finally the Parthenon and Pantheon of Greece and Italy. 
The pyramids of Nubia and Egypt, with one exception, 
and that one not undisputed, are undoubtedly the Mausolea 
of the early Pharaohs ; while all the other primeval Egyp- 
tian monuments are private tombs. The earlier Egyptian 
temples were avowedly erected in honour of deceased 
monarchs by their sons. The custom was transplanted 
from the soil of the valley of the Nile to all surrounding 
lands. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in Asia Minor 
was one of the wonders of the world. No trace of it re- 



YIIT.] ARCHITECTURE. 191 

mains. But the vast tomb of Massinissa in Numidia, 200 
yards in diameter, and the tomb of Hadrian at Borne,, still 
challenge the admiration of mankind. But why select ex- 
amples here and there, when the grave-mounds of forgotten 
princes covered the entire surface of the earth, and furnish 
to our antiquaries their oldest and most precious curiosi- 
ties. Nor is it needful to go back to the youthful days of 
Mitzraim to study fragments which escaped the iconoclastic 
hammer of Cambyse's only to be submerged by the Libyan 
or Arabian sands. The greatest living empire of the world 
is to-day practising and illustrating throughout its 16 pro- 
vinces, each one a mighty kingdom in itself, that architec- 
ture of ancestral worship which, having antedated, will 
survive and swallow up all other works of men. The tombs 
of the Ming dynasty near Pekin show that the self-same sen- 
timents and ideas continue to rule the human heart and 
direct the artist's hand which called into magnificent ex- 
istence five thousand years ago the Colossi of Benihassan 
and the Necropolis of Thebes. A thousand things in Chi- 
nese life impress the traveller strangely with the devotion 
of the entire nation to these tender and reverential tastes 
and feelings for the dead. To the father nothing is refused. 
The most acceptable present that a son can make him is a 
coffin. He knows that death will be no bar to his advance- 
ment in honours, for the merit of his child will illuminate 
his name. Nobility is not prospective but retrospective in 
the Central kingdom. The hero's deeds, the sage's wisdom, 
the statesman's success ennobles not his descendants but his 
ancestry. The degenerate barbarism of Europe has sub- 
stituted the sordid interests of property for gratitude and 
piety. 

Ancestral worship, or the homage which the living offer j 
to the dead, is not only the most extensive, but the only uni- 
versal form of religion upon the earth, and the oldest of 
which any traces remain in early history. It was natural, 
therefore, that the first tomb should be the first temple, 
and vice versa. That desire to live which was given to 
mankind in common with the other animals, as a safeguard 
to his life, contained within it germs of thought and senti- 
ment, which were in process of time developed into a thirst 
for immortality. This caused the living to erect their own 
tombs; and civilization has done little to change the 



192 THE ORIGIN OP [LECT. 

ancient custom. True, circumstances may render indi- 
viduals reckless ; and, if long enough adverse and charged 
with sufficient misery, may even obliterate from families 
and tribes the acquired instinct of ancestral worship. 
Livingstone represents the Makololo as totally careless 
about the bodies of their dead, and hostile to every re- 
membrance of their past existence.* Yet such are rare ex- 
ceptions to the general rule. 

In ancient days the father was not only the giver of life, 
but the lawgiver who could order it away. Abraham sa- 
crificing Isaac to Jehovah, or sending away Ishmael and 
his mother into the desert ; Jephthah paroling his daughter 
for a month ; the king of Moab slaying his first-born on the 
city wall in sight of the hosts of Israel : — we read these 
stories so often that they cease to make their natural im- 
pression on us. The ancient father was in fact .both family 
priest and king ; and when he died he became the family 
deity. The chief of a tribe was but the greater father of a 
larger family ; and when he died a grander fane arose in 
homage of his power and virtues. I am not one of those 
who entertain the theory, that all the deities of ancient 
times were monarchs, or benefactors, or emigrating chief- 
tains deified. No ! the worship of a man ceased with the 
generation who succeeded him ; as only one pope at a time 
can occupy the sarcophagus over the doorway in St Peter's. 
But nevertheless there is no denying or mistaking the 
combined action of the two causes which I have just named 
upon the rise of architecture, viz. the man's own desire for 
an eternal mansion, and the honours which his children 
voted him. 

The most ancient specimens of architecture whose date 
we know, are certain tombs of Memphis, which M. Mariette 
has recently uncovered from the sands of the great plain, 
on the edge of which stand their next descendants in 
architectural age, the pyramids. These tombs were built 
originally, like the houses of a city, in rows, separated by 
narrow streets, some of which are cul-de-sacs, or courts. 
The tombs themselves have all one form, that of a small 
pylon, or truncated pyramid ; the facade, or front towards 

* See Livingstone's curious account of ' hiding the dead ' on the Zam- 
besi. 



VIII.] AECHITECTUEE. . 193 

the street, decorated witli long prismatic mouldings, ter- 
minate in lotus leaves tied together by the peduncles. 
This is M. Kenan' s description : and he refers for illustra- 
tion to Lepsius' Denkmaeler aus ^Egypten und ^Ethiopien, 
prem. part, pi 25, 26. You will hereafter see the import- 
ance of this ornamentation to a correct theory of archi- 
tecture; but at present let me continue the description 
of these interesting monuments. The door of each tomb 
is very narrow, and never in the centre of the front. Over 
it is cut the hieroglyphic guitar, a cylindrical drum or 
tabret, carrying J the name of the dead. Here he lives for 
evermore, always at home. It is his c everlasting home/ 
the very term the old Egyptians used to designate a tomb. 
And the interior arrangement agreed with this idea. It 
was arranged for the reception of his surviving friends on 
certain days of the year. Therefore in the oldest times — ■ 
at the extreme dawn of history — the first — absolutely the 
first scene which is presented to our eyes, is precisely 
that which the modern traveller beholds when he visits on 
All Souls' Day the Parisian cemetery of Pere la Chaise, 
or the tombs of the Ming dynasty near Pekin. Ancestral 
worship was the first and will be the last religion of man- 
kind. 

Entering now one of these old Memphite tombs *one sees 
engraved upon the walls the master of the house in the 
bosom of his family ; his wife, his children, his servants, 
his scribes, his household furniture, around him. His own 
portrait in bas-relief occupies the post of honour, and is 
commonly repeated in several places ; while a large stele, 
or obelisk-like pyramid, gives his titles and sometimes 
his biography, his characteristic traits, even his infirmities, 
to ensure the continuance of his personality. How strong 
must have been the lust for immortality which ruled the 
breasts of those old people ! I mentioned in a former 
lecture with what detail the agricultural habits and man- 
ners, tools and animals, of this primitive Egyptian race 
was given in these family picture-galleries ; and how no 
trace of war or of religion is apparent in them. 

This we must dwell on here a little ; not to discuss the 
origin of the religious sentiment or its realization in wor- 
ship, to which I shall devote a future lecture ; but for the 

13 



194 THE ORIGIN OF [LECT. 

bearing of the fact upon the theory of architecture. In 
these tombs we find, I say, no trace of those chapters of 
the ritual of the dead, which, under subsequent dynasties 
of kings and priests in Egypt, came at last to constitute 
the obligatory ornamentation of all tombs.* In the an- 
cienter times of the Memphite tomb -builders, the deity 
seems to have had neither name nor image. The dog 
Anubis, on whom the trinitarian spirit of a later date be- 
stowed three heads, the Cerberus Of Greek mythology, 
appears indeed upon the walls as the guardian or watch- 
dog of the tomb. But where is Osiris — that special 
funeral god of the later dynasties ? For these more ancient 
Memphite f everlasting homes/ he has as yet no existence. 
They are in no respects funereal chapels consecrated to a 
divinity. Death, is the only deity acknowledged here. 
We are in the rear of all mythologies ; behind the curtain 
the drama of religion has not yet commenced. We are 
still in the primeval age of man's existence upon earth, 
before the birth of kingdoms and priesthoods, as we know 
those things ; yet also, at the end of that great age, just 
when it is about to breed another age, and pass, itself, into 
its f everlasting home/ 

But we have here true architecture and the fine arts 



* ' The tombs of Memphis are all dated in the six first dynasties ; and 
without this they would still indicate their relative age by their style and 
the order of their ideas. Compare them with the grottoes of Beni Haman 
(2500 B.C.) where the ideas are the same, death the only deity of an eter- 
nal home, a grand, gay chamber alive with pictures, but with neither 
superstitions nor terrors. Then compare them with the tombs of Biban- 
el-molouk, near Thebes (1500 B.C.), and see the sudden and complete 
change! A Christian and a pagan tomb could not more differ. The dead is 
no longer at home ; a pantheon of gods have usurped his place ; images of 
Osiris, and chapters of the ritual cover the walls ; graved with a care as if 
the world must read them, and yet shut up in everlasting darkness, but 
supernaturally powerful. Horrible fictions, the foolishest vagaries of the 
human brain. The priest has got the better of the situation; these 
death-trials are good alms for him, he can abridge the poor soul's tor- 
ments. What a nightmare is this tomb of Sethos ! How far we have got 
from the primeval faith in death and survivance after it, without the cere- 
monial of the priest, or long list of names divine, ending in sordid super- 
stition. One of our Gothic cathedrals differs less from one of the tombs 
on the Appian Way than do the old tombs of Sakkara from those which 
fill the strange valley of Biban-el-molouk.' (Eenan.) 



VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 195 

already born; nay, more, already perfect in one of their 
careers. 

Nothing, in fact, would so thoroughly dispel the scep- 
ticism of religious people respecting the antiquity of man- 
kind as a good examination of these monuments. They say 
themselves that they belong to the first dynasties of Egypt, 
and yet their construction is as perfectly beautiful as if 
they bore over their doors names of the monarchs of the 
18th or 22nd dynasties, 2000 years later of date. What is 
so astonishing, so bewildering, is this : that art and archi- 
tecture, when we see it first, is in its full maturity. The 
painting, carving, and building-arts (to judge by these 
Memphite tombs) have had apparently no infancy. And 
it is only by turning from Egypt to other lands, and from 
these wonderful treasures preserved beneath the sand, to 
the cyclopean walls, to the circles of standing stones, and 
to the Druid barrows, that we are reminded of those vast 
stretches of time before Memphis and its people had ex- 
istence, ages of night and wandering for races of mankind, 
whose only monuments were some stray boulder poised 
upon a hill, or some smooth rock beside a stream, on 
which they could engrave a few rude effigies ; — races 
which have all perished, without one name engraved in 
legible characters ; without one shrine to keep alive the 
remembrance of a single deity. 

But were we to dogmatise in this fashion about the early 
and sudden blooming out of Egyptian art, or Chinese 
civilization, as if they were created perfect, and had no be- 
ginning, simply because we can find no records of such 
beginning, we must forget that a record is impossible 
without a scribe to make it. Mankind without arts have 
no means of recording the history of their arts. Art is a 
self-recording instrument indeed, but not until it is itself 
completed. And when we examine the Egyptian record a 
little closer, we can perceive in it a confession of improve- 
ment and progress, which relieves us of historical embar- 
rassment. If Mariette can say of the fourth dynasty that 
its opening reigns yield us prodigies of an unexampled 
civilization, unexampled at that moment in the world, a 
society definitely constituted, a development of art at a 
height hardly to be topped by the most brilliant epochs 
afterwards, and an architecture elegant, he must add that 



196 THE origin or [lect. 

all this marks a sudden and extraordinary movement, the 
cause of which is hidden from our research ; and we must 
remember that three dynasties had preceded, numbering 
as many centuries as have elapsed between the Norman 
conquest and the present day; time enough, one would 
imagine, for the growth of all the arts and ail the 
sciences. 

It is admirable to see with what fidelity the builders of 
the Memphite tombs did all their work. It reminds one 
of the enthusiasm of the builders of the Middle Ages. And 
yet M. Mariette has distinguished in the early tombs of 
Egypt three classes. The most ancient, like that of Amten, 
exhibit art and literature in process of formation, the 
hieroglyphs widely separated (clair-seme) and in relief. 
Rude forms abound. The statues are thick and short, with 
all their anatomical details exaggerated. The second class, 
the best example of which is Ti's tomb at Saqqarah, are 
better placed, with hieroglyphs less boldly striking, and 
more harmoniously grouped, making the text more legible. 
The alphabeti element begins little by little to substitute 
itself for the syllabic, which forms so large a part of the 
older legends. Ascending genealogies become rare. The 
formulae of invocation are addressed to Anubis alone. 
The third class, contemporary with the 6th dynasty, begin 
to show the name of Osiris, and the formula of justifica- 
tion, in text more lengthened out, with beautiful forms of 
prayer, and biographical recitals, to vary a little the mo- 
notony of representation. In these, and in the tombs of 
the second class of the time of Ti, are found those beautiful 
and smoothly worked-out statues, with visage round and 
smiling mouth, fine nose, large shoulders, and stout limbs, 
which form so numerous and precious a collection in the 
Boulaq Museum. And in these tombs are also found those 
enormous monolithic steles cut into the form of a facade, of 
which the Museum has so rich a collection also. These 
are, then, the three stages of the oldest Egyptian art. 
Then came a long break, perhaps the Dark Ages of the 
ancient empire. We pass down through five more centu- 
ries to the 11th dynasty, when a Renaissance appears, with 
Isis for its deity, and marks which cut it off from any di- 
rect inheritance from the art that had preceded it by so 
long an interval. The steles, formerly square at top, have 



VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 197 

now become rounded. The hieroglyphics have a particu- 
lar awkwardness resembling not at all those of the tombs 
of the 3rd dynasty. The sarcophagi are also different, 
and colours are in vogue. Then comes the splendid age 
of obelisks, colossal statues, grand grotto-temples, and all 
that make the borders of the Nile and Thebes the wonder 
of the world. 

I once enjoyed the rare opportunity of getting upon 
the roof of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, in company 
of the architect to whom was intrusted the superintend- 
ence of its restoration, under Louis Philipe. After I had 
feasted my eyes upon that glorious panorama — which I 
think is finer from this point of view than from the top 
of Notre Dame — I occupied myself with the bits of carving 
which surround the pinnacles of the buttresses, and which 
are entirely invisible to persons in the street, — hundreds 
of leaves and flowers, and delicate morsels of fretwork, 
which no eye had seen for centuries, even since the stone- 
cutters had hoisted the blocks unchiselled to their places, 
and yet as nicely wrought as if they were intended for 
the doorway in the porch. And I could not help asking 
myself the question, When will our architects get such a 
conscience as those old masons had?* And I wondered 
also when the time would come for a public taste impatient 
of our meretricious sham shop-fronts on Chesnut-street or 
Broadway, showing their ragged edges and unfinished 
cornice-ends, and soft brick- side walls, up and down the 
street as shamelessly as harlots in the evening flaunt their 
tawdry. 

The old Memphite tombs were built to last, and to last 
beautiful. They were to be homes always. They bore no 
resemblance at all to our family tombs, crowded with 
coffins, hideous with mildew and fungous vegetation, 
generating horrors of the imagination to be surpassed 
only by those which breed within the modern so-called 
Christian doctrine of eternal damnation. There is nothing 
to suggest the Columbaria, or pigeon-cote burial-places, of 
the Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Christians of the Roman day; 
nor those vast catacombs in which whole congregations 
of believers in a future life were laid away to sleep together, 

* See Renan's beautiful description of this perfect conscientious art, p. 
673 (Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st April, 1S65). 



198 THE OEIGIN OF [lECT. 

until the archangel's trump should wake them up together 
for the judgment-day. 

The Egyptian farmer's soul lived all alone in his ' eternal 
mansion/ Each tomb was individual. Except in some 
few cases, even the wife had no admission with her husband 
to it. He was satisfied with her picture, among those of 
all his other domestic animals. Except on the solemn 
anniversary, the narrow door was shut, and darkness ob- 
literated the pictures, except to the departed ghost. He 
was supposed to regale himself with the offered fruits and 
cooked food which his friends left in his chamber. Some 
of these touching proofs that love and veneration have 
always swelled the human bosom have remained there un- 
touched all those thousands of years, until M. Mariette 
opened once more the doors. 

But the prime point for our reflection is the fact that 
there is nothing of the tomb about these tombs ; they are 
houses — homes. They feared but one thing — disturbance. 
With what horror must the ejection from his tomb have been 
contemplated by the old man of the Nile ! The possible loss 
of his hereditary lands could not more shock an English 
nobleman. To be turned out and sent adrift, homeless 
for ever, a poor ghost unable to build but once and never 
more ! Imagine his feelings in view of such an irreme- 
diable and infinite calamity ! I believe that these Egyptian 
sentiments, entertained as they were by all the early races 
of mankind, were the originals of all those superstitions of 
Hades, and haunted places, and uneasy spirits, which 
exist to-day. How different the dying Christian's thoughts ! 
To him there is no isolation in the tomb. He sees 
heaven opened, and flies to join the great congregation of 
the first-born in the kingdom of the Lord who rules the 
heavens and the earth under the new dispensation. And 
as the old Egyptians had the idea of immortality, so even 
the cave-dwellers of the south of France must have been 
led by it to make their burnt- offerings to the dead, as M. 
Lartet has shown. The peculiarity of Christianity consists 
in the fact that it was both life and immortality which were 
brought to light by Jesus Christ. 

The care with which the body of the dead was preserved 
in a sarcophagus,* and the care with which the sarco- 

* The sarcophagus is an immense cube of granite or white marble, the 



Vni.] ARCHITECTURE. 199 

phagus was concealed in a chamber of its own nearly 100 
feet underground, approached by a well sunk in the thickest 
part of the masonry, and then by a horizontal gallery, so 
arranged as to make it extremely difficult to discover the 
whereabouts of the sarcophagus — all show how dreadful 
an idea the profanation or disturbance of his body must 
have been to the living Egyptian.* To derange his repose 
was to compromise his eternal salvation. How his body 
was to share in his soul's immortality, perhaps, was never 
a clearly formulated dogma in the Egyptian creed, if there 
was such a creed. But mummification became afterwards 
one of the fine arts, and combined sculpture and painting 
with all the most shameless tricks both of priestcraft and 
of trade. It would be a perfect farce to tell you of the 
shrewd devices of the Egyptian undertakers in a later age, 
to say nothing of the grim mistakes which have been made 
in lecture-rooms in this country. I remember when a 
mummy-case, purporting to be that of a Pharaoh's daughter, 
was solemnly opened and unwrapped before a crowded 
audience ; I think Mr Agassiz was present and took part 
in the proceedings ; the case contained the body of a boy, 
and nobody has ever been able to explain the misad- 
venture, except on general principles — that the Egyptian 
undertakers were great rascals. 

In the earliest times there were also images made of the 
deceased, but they were exquisitely well done, and the 
sole intention seems to have been to preserve the personal 
identity of the departed, to make sure that his ownership 
of his own ' everlasting home 9 could always be identified, 
that no false claimant might ever eject him from it. These 
images are now found concealed in little wells in the masonry 
of the tomb. The number of them already collected is 

walls of which are sometimes decorated with prism-shaped reeds 
(rainures), and other ornaments analogous to those of the facade of the 
tomb. 

* The same spirit presides over the queer construction of the pyramids. 
Each was the inaccessible, eternal home of a king. Their entrances were 
never in the middle of a side, and carefully sealed up. The galleries 
within were filled with rocks, from the tumbling in of the roofs, after 
accomplishing which the workmen escaped by curiously constructed shafts 
of exit. These precautions were so successful that the chamber of Cheops 
was not reached by any explorer until the days of Caliph Mamoud, 5000 
years and more after it was built. (Rinan.) 



200 THE OEIGIN OF [lECT. 

very great.* Some are of wood, some of granite, some of 
marble. One, to be seen in the Museum of Charles X., 
represents a scribe, executed with the minute finesse of a 

* Museum of Bou'laq. Some are in the Louvre. ' It is ugly, common, 
vulgar assuredly, but nothing ever came up nearer to the intention of the 
maker. It is an unequalled prodigy, this wooden statue of the Museum 
of Boulaq, to which the fellahs gave unanimously, on its discovery, the 
name of Scheickh-el-bilad, " The Village Sheik." It is the statue of a 
certain Phtah-se, cousin to the king. His wife's statue was found near 
it. The expression of naif contentment spreading itself over the smiling 
figures of these two good folks is plain enough to see. One would call 
them two Dutchmen of the times of Louis XIV. One may not doubt, 
looking at these statues, that before the period of royal despotism and 
sumptuousness, Egypt had an epoch of patriarchal liberty. The pomp- 
ous official art of the Thouthmes and the Rameses did not lower itself to 
represent such bonhommie any more than the artists of Versailles bent 
down their dignities to paint "Magots" (boobies, puppies). In fact 
these two astonishing morceaux are of the 4th or 5th dynasty. Will you 
say that here we have primitive art starting on its career with such mi- 
nutiae ? Consider first, I pray you, that Egyptian art was not at its 
debut but in its perfection then. What is most extraordinary in this 
civilization is, that it had no infancy, We seek in vain for an archaic 
period of Egyptian art. In architecture that is easy enough to under- 
stand, for it finds the means of accomplishing its desires commonly much 
sooner than the plaster arts can do it. But for sculpture to divest itself 
of all rudeness and awkwardness centuries are requisite. Greece, Italy of 
the middle ages, prove it. But such a statue as that of Chephren, of 
which I shall soon speak, and all the statues of the ancient empire, are 
not at all in the style of a middle age. They have a definite style of 
their own. Viewed as to the measure of the nation's genius, they could 
not be done better. Egypt in this, as in so many other things, contradicts 
the laws we assign to the Indo-Germanic and Shemitic races. She begins 
her career, not in myth, in heroism, in barbarism. She is a China, born 
mature, almost decrepit, having always had that air at once of infamy and 
age which her monuments and her history reveal. The divine youth of the 
Yavanas (lonians, Yavanasdones, the youths, Juvenes) was ever unknown 
to her. That she started with realism, with platitude, does not amaze 
me more than that she started with good sense, good domestic economy, 
the right sense of worthy farmers, knowing exactly the number of their 
geese and asses. We are not here on the soil of Homer and Phidias ; we 
are in the land of clear and rapid conscience, but limited and stationary. 
Solon's priest of Sais thought himself sarcastic when he said, "You Greeks 
are babies ; there are none old among you ; you are all young in spirit : " 
but it was the profound error of a narrow-minded conservative, proud of 
that which marked his own inferiority. It is permitted man not to be 
always young, but it is needful to have been young once. These intelligent 
guardians of dead letters could not see what made the force and beauty of 
Greece, as many a heavy spirit of our days thinks that he has exhausted 
language against France when he has affixed to her name the epithet of 
revolutionary.' — Henan. 



VIII.] ARCHITECTURE, 201 

perfect realism, which refers us to more ancient' times, 
when savages criticised the forms of nature with no aesthetic 
sentiment, but with the interest of life and death. Hence 
we have in these images an ethnographic precision, like 
that of Chinese or any other cultivated but unideal art. 

Let us reflect a moment. Wherein does the savage of 
primeval times most differ from the philosophic citizen of 
modern Boston ? Is it not in this — that life, and nature, 
and art, and thought were to the savage man all in detail ; 
but to the civilized are in the general ? As the savage 
spent his time alone, spearing one fish, luring one bird, 
trapping one animal, whittling out one arrow at a time, 
measuring the ground with single paces, skulking from 
tree to tree, and stopping behind each — so all natural and 
primitive art must be detailed, precise, and characteristic 
of single individual forms and movements. We, on the 
contrary, we civilized people, live in crowds. Our cities 
are aggregates of houses, even with walls and roofs in 
common. Our furniture is made by machinery, and shovel- 
led into our life by the million. We have lost all idea 
of distance in miles and furlongs, like the Irish woman 
from Boston, who refused to believe that she had arrived 
at the West Newton station -platform., protesting that " if 
she'd ha' known it wasn't any further than that she'd ha' 
walked." All our thinking now is done in generals. Science 
is merely generalization. Hence our art has become ab- 
stract also. The feeble attempts of the Pre-Raphaelites 
only show how utterly disagreeable to the genius of our 
day would be a return to the individualization and charac- 
teristic detailed particularity of the first stage of Egyptian 
art ; when every man built his own tomb, and every image 
in it was an exact, unflattering, conscientious portrait of 
himself. 

One more reflection before we proceed. The science of 
the fine arts is the science of beauty, taste, an apprecia- 
tion of the fitness of things, harmony, proportion, sym- 
metry or rhyme, and alliteration or rhythm, — that law of 
all laws in the Cosmos, the law of pulsation, vibration, or 
paroxysmal repetition. Now, why do we never expect taste 
from a savage; and why do we count taste among the prime 
criteria of good-breeding? Ethnologists have laid down a 
rale for themselves in estimating the relative antiquity of 



202 THE OEIGIN OF [LECT. 

their discoveries. If the objects which they find are polished, 
they consider them comparatively recent ; if ruder, more 
ancient ; if very rude, primeval. But what right have 
they to establish such a canon ? Are there not bad masons 
a plenty, laying up tumble-down walls to-day ; and miser- 
able sculptors cutting thousands of horrible tombstones 
for Mount Auburn and Laurel Hill, which they expect the 
world to call fine monuments ? What is the ground for 
this distinction between rude and polished art ? I will 
tell you. The savage has bad taste, because taste is that 
faculty which deals with the true relationships of things. 
Knowledge, therefore, cultivates Taste ; and the savage is 
ignorant. Not the knowledge of things in detail, but of 
things in their relationships. Nature deals in what we call 
delicate touches, and these require sharp eyes to see — 
loving, patient, educated eyes. This is why sorrow refines 
the soul. Sorrow is ejection from self into tbe world's 
wretchedness ; the hurling of the soul from its vantage 
tower of isolation, down upon the hard pavements and 
among the hostile crowds below. Sorrow, disaster, teaches 
men strange bed-fellows, enlarges their comprehension of 
the worlds in which they live, and so refines them. But 
even this source of refinement the savage has not ; for his 
sorrows are solitary ; his woes annihilate him like thunder- 
bolts ; he perishes too easily ; there are no ameliorations 
in his lot ; his taste continues hard, for he has nothing 
about him but the raw stuff of nature, inexorably cruel to 
him, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse, and 
only now and then grimly laughing at him through some 
odd antic or queer shape of the animal or vegetable king- 
dom. His imitations, therefore, of nature must be gross, 
rude, and individual. He has had neither eyes to discover, 
nor tools to imitate, those combinations of force and form 
which constitute nature ; still less the taste to feel those 
delicate ideals of all forms, those Ariels of the tempest of 
this earth-life, floating high before the soul, and beautiful, 
and musical as beautiful. These are the spirits of our 
architecture. These were the genii of Phidias and Prax- 
iteles, the Prosperos of that magic Isle of Art, at whose 
command sprang up the divine porticoes of the Parthenon — 
that Miranda of the Island ; and the three thousand statues 
of the Olympium at Elis — that synod of all man's exquisite 



VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. 203 

imaginations, that symposium of all forms of strength and 
beauty realized in marble, ivory, and gold. 

But even Greece was not well bred enough to compre- 
hend the grander combinations of a later day. It needed 
the marriage of the Classic and Teutonic races to produce 
the Gothic cathedral. And when the time was fully come, 
and that wondrous world of reeded piers, and skyey arches, 
buttresses and pinnacles, towers and spires, in combination, 
like the solar system, or the framework of the Christian 
church, rose above the grave of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, 
see how those three thousand deities of ancient Greece 
rose too from their old seats in Elis, and flew to perch 
upon its pinnacles. Painters came journeying from every 
side of Christendom to hang their histories of angels, 
saints, and martyrs on its piers. Musicians choired for 
ever in its chapels, as naturally as nightingales collect 
among the copses of the Rhine. Kings, dukes, and mer- 
chants built between its buttresses their tombs, or decor- 
ated shrines to their tutelary saints with offerings of every 
precious stone and work of art, whatever they could find, 
or buy, or steal, to save their wretched souls. Emperors 
hung up along its vaulting naves the tattered ensigns of 
their vanquished enemies. Pilgrims, returned from Holy 
Land, and poor pale women, convalescing from some des- 
perate malady, placed there their shell and scrip, or votive 
wax light, or bouquet of artificial flowers. In times of war 
and pestilence the multitude from the surrounding country 
rushed to the cathedral church as their sure ark of safety. 
God shut them in. The deluge might rage outside ; but 
they were safe. They called it therefore going into the 
temple Nave, from nmis, the Latin word for ship. The old [ 
Greeks had the same name for a temple, Naos, because ' 
naus was the Greek for ship. Architecture was to the 
ancients, not the building of arches, but_of arks, into which 
the suffering crowds might be led when troubles rose upon 
the earth and men despaired of living. 

Around the cathedral the whole religious hierarchy 
organized itself. On one side stands the baptistry, by 
which the ark is entered, spiritually. On the other stands 
the chapter-house, where laws are made to govern the 
church and regulate its services. A covered way in one 
direction leads to the archbishop's palace, full of noble 



204 THE OEIGIN OF [LECT. 

guests from every land. In the other direction stretch 
the cloisters of recluses, automata, by which the ceremonial 
goes on with all the rhythmical steadiness of planetary 
motion ; or learned men, who keep alive the old traditions 
of it ; or charitable men, busy about the hospitals and at 
bedsides, almoners of the Church's charities, or preachers 
to the poor and hard-worked million. Then in its vaults 
we have more relationships — these with the past ; sarco- 
phagi of founders, builders, restorers, rulers of the Church ; 
the relics of the saints ; caskets of precious jewels ; boxes 
of gold and silver plate, rich vestments, wealth bequeathed 
for the care of its roof and walls, and all its numerous uses. 
If we ascend its staircase we may find within its roof a 
little village of carpenters, masons, plumbers and glaziers, 
always occupied in keeping the vast edifice in good repair, 
— for it is mortal, like other things in this world, and if 
unwatched, would fall piecemeal, and crumble (like some 
tall cliff or mountain cedar) into the dust again from which 
it rose. Happy the ancient Memphite tombs, over whom 
the sonsy sands were spread, like a bed of snow in winter, 
to protect the grain for spring. 

I have given you this picture of the architecture of what 
we misname f the Middle Ages 9 (but which are, as to the 
whole world-history of man, the modern times in which we 
actually live), in order to show that the development of art 
consists in these complex relationships ; that a cathedral 
temple has grown up, like a mountain mass, by the addi- 
tion of layer upon layer, formation upon formation, all 
different, and yet closely related ; by successive additions 
of great ideas, — ideas bred of civilization, of many super- 
imposed civilizations ; ideas produced by the conflux of 
human interests ; correlated ideas of state policy, religious 
sentiment, and family interests. And as it required the 
varied experiences of many ages and many races to com- 
bine in one great monument the parts of a cathedral, so it 
requires in the spectator a life rich in these ideas to 
appreciate and admire such a monument. 

The traveller must have travelled much, read much, 
been greatly conversant with human things ; swept with 
his own experience through a wide circle of adventures ; 
grasped the meanings of many social and political pheno- 
mena, and undergone great revolutions in his own soul, — ■ 



Till.] ARCHITECTURE. 205 

or he will walk through the solemn aisles as a brute beast 
grazes heedlessly among the grandest and most beautiful 
scenes in nature. If he be a narrow bigot, he will look on 
all the symbolic devices around him. as a vulgar raree-show, 
and scoff at the great temple as a house of idols. If he be 
a petty shopman, he will merely price in his own sordid 
mind the money value of the golden censer and the marble 
tomb. If he be a mere political economist he will murmur 
at the vast and useless expense of walls and arches, 
towers and pinnacles, as Judas Iscariot did of old, when 
the woman broke her alabaster box of precious ointment 
to pour its contents upon Jesus' feet. If he be a mere 
statesman and a democrat, he will bluster over the despotism 
of priests, the selfish pride of princes, and the beggarly 
self-indulgence of the monastic orders. If he be a mere 
painter or sculptor, uninstructed in the greatest thoughts 
of all ages, he will occupy his narrowed taste in paltry 
criticisms upon this or the other work of art ; carp at the 
architrave mouldings, complain of the want of symmetry 
between the more ancient Norman nave and the more 
modern pointed Gothic choir, or draw detracting compari- 
sons between the facade of this and of some other temple 
which he fancies rather. None but a noble mind, enlarged 
by the influx of all the past, can comprehend a great cathe- 
dral, and the genius of its architects. 

A savage cannot do this. He is stupified by the incom- 
prehensible. The cockney Englishman, — the raw Ameri- 
can grown suddenly rich by some infernal speculation, — 
such men tramp through Europe like the Goths and 
Vandals from the forests of ancient Germany. They read 
no story in its monuments. They sail up the Nile, and 
although its granite walls are covered with writings, these 
are blank hieroglyphics to such eyes. It is not seeing 
much that gives man taste or knowledge : it is seeing the 
relationships of things. Better see a few fine specimens 
and analyze and comprehend their relationships, than see 
all things with an unenlightened, unreflecting eye. Napo- 
leon said it in his famous sentence : ' Soldiers ! forty 
centuries look down on you from the pyramids/ The 
Anglo-Saxon calls that bombast. No ; none but a Napo- 
leon would have thought of such an apostrophe. The past 
reflects itself in the world's monuments. It is the com- 



206 THE ORIGIN OP [LECT. 

monest event to hear a stupid Englishman pride himself on 
his nonchalance for ruins. Why ? because he is ignorant 
of history ; he sees no true relation "between a crumbling 
ruin and his- own well-upholstered drawing-room or 
smoking-room or billiard-room at home. And yet had not 
those ruins been, he had never been the comfortable, care- 
less, arrogant, impertinent Anglo-Saxon gentleman he is. 

I have heard this story told of a New England clergyman ; 
perhaps some of you may have heard it told of some one 
else ; it may be true or false ; but it illustrates what I 
mean to say. Prying about the island of Malta to discover 
the scene of St Paul's shipwreck, he noticed an English 
officer standing in a doorway, and addressed him with the 
question : c Pray, sir, can you inform me where the Apostle 
Paul was shipwrecked? ' e Ha ! ; was the fierce and quick 
response. The brother meekly repeated the question : 
( Can you tell me where Saint Paul was shipwrecked ? ' ( No, 
sir ! we want none of your damned conundrums here ! ' 
The soldier had probably never heard of the event, so full 
of interest to the clergyman; or if he had, had never 
thought of modern Malta being the Melita of Scripture 
history. In fact, all history is a conundrum to such men. 
Savages have no history at all. 

Everything in mind, in taste, in generosity, in liberty 
of one's own soul, depends upon the view we get of great 
relationships. This is why the highest prospects please us 
least in travelling. The view from the summit of Mount 
Washington is far inferior to the views we get from many 
of the lower summits of the White Hills. We see an im- 
mense panorama, but reduced to one dead level and re- 
moved from accurate inspection. We must get some 
standing-point, whence we can see the true construction of 
things. Cons traction, not structure only. We must be 
able to tie this and that together, glance up as well as 
down, get many vistas in many directions ; see how the 
snow feeds the glacier, and the glacier breeds the river, 
and the river waters the vale, and the vale debouches on 
the plain. 

The finest view I know of in the United States is from 
the summit of Penobscot Knob, from which you look down 
upon the valley of Wyoming. You see the whole geology 
of the region at a glance, — the Third Anthracite coal 



VIII.] ARCHITECTUEB. 207 

basin, with its rira of conglomerate, — the long canoe of 
the Upper Devonian mountain, inclosing it on each side 
and at the ends — outside of which spread out the Middle 
Devonian valleys. Far to the north stands the great wall of 
the Alleghanies, with the edge of the First Bituminous coal 
basin on its summit. As far to the south the Beaver- 
Meadow mountains spread themselves against the sky, 
bearing up the basins of the Second Anthracite Coal Field. 
Through a bold gorge you see the broad sheet of the 
Susquehannah river come winding superbly in among the 
corn-covered plains of Kingston in one direction, and 
sweeping majestically out again through a second gap to- 
wards the west ; then for the third time striking across 
the canoe, between grand cliffs, it passes on towards the 
sea. Close by, in the centre of the fertile fields of the val- 
ley, glitters the beautiful little city of Wilksbarre. Be- 
yond it, on the Kingston side, a small grey monument 
rises to mark the place of the old story of the Indian mas- 
sacre, and brings to mind the verses of the poet Campbell. 
On the same northern bank of the river, a little farther 
down, you may perceive where men have opened up an 
Indian graveyard in grading for a grand trunk railway to 
connect the mines and carry off their produce to New York. 
A hundred collieries with their tall chimneys and huge 
breakers (those curious institutions peculiar to American 
collieries) remind you of the genius of the present day. 
The hum of many trains fill the air. Just at your feet 
burrows a deep ravine, with a fine water-fall; and on a 
plot of grass beside it is a pic-nic party of smart shop- 
keepers and pretty girls, who claim descent from the Con- 
necticut settlers four generations back. Passenger cars are 
being dragged up by three incline-planes to a water-shed 
four hundred feet below you. But, see ! A thunder gust 
is coming up, bred in the Buffalo mountains, which bound 
the far-off western horizon. It spreads its great black 
wings to the right and left, laying its thundering bosom 
on the Wyoming mountain, as it rushes on towards you. 
You stand upon a natural plate of rock, on which you notice 
marks, not made by man, nor by the common elements — 
long, parallel, straight lines — diluvial scratches they are 
called. You may observe they point across the valley, be- 
yond the city, and the river, and the monument, precisely 



208 THE OEIGIN OP [LECT. 

towards the gap in the Schickshinny Mountain opposite, 
through which the river breaks at Campbell's Ledge. A 
geologist will tell you that these scratches were made by 
glacial ice coming from Canada. The glacier, entering by 
that gap, must once have crossed and filled the valley, and 
so flowed on, southward, over the mountain top on which 
you stand. And this, of course, innumerable years before 
the Red man had discovered how to harvest maize upon 
those bloody flats. 

- But, tell me ! were the Indian to return and seat him- 
self upon this eminence, would he see all this ? Or, would 
a Hebrew dealer in old clothes ? Imagine a savage hap- 
pening here when all beneath his eye was an unbroken 
wilderness, before a ship had crossed the Atlantic or a 
lump of coal had been inflamed; and then imagine Sir 
Charles Lyell, or Henry D. Rogers, or James Hall, or Sir 
William Logan assembling there around him a knot of 
geologists, politicians, historians, engineers, artists, and 
poets ; Longfellow and Emerson, Bancroft and Hildreth, 
Trautwine and Haupt, Bierstadt and Church, Charles Sum- 
ner and Wendell Philips, Treasurer McCulloch and Chief- 
Justice Chase, — if you would comprehend how wholly the 
sentiment of the beautiful and sublime depends for its ali- 
ment upon the knowledge of relationships : and then you 
can also comprehend how the architecture of our modern 
days, how the grand architecture of any past age which 
had one, needed times and revolutions and the unfoldings 
of all human passions, and the realization of all human 
ideas, to have an existence even in possibility. 

Savages have no art, no architecture, because they have 
no eyes except for food and dagger ; because they take 
things seriatim, each unrelated to the rest. Two senti- 
ments inform the savage mind : death and the love of 
parents. These produced the earliest art. Their ancient 
gods were things which threatened death, and persons 
who bestowed and protected life. Ancestral worship, 
therefore, or the burial aud after- worship of the parent by 
the child, and of the chief or petty king by his tribe or 
subjects, constituted the first of all religions ; and tombs 
gave origin to all architecture. 

I have made this long digression for the purpose of clear- 
ing the way to some correct theory of architecture; with 



VIII.] AKCHITECTUKE. 209 

no intention, however, of dogmatizing against other more 
or less accepted theories which do not seem to me so pro- 
bable, but which, nevertheless, claim more than a passing 
notice ; although I think that I can show that, while they 
draw attention to some important points in the history of 
architecture, and to a certain extent explain some stages 
of its historical development, they offer no sufficiently 
broad explanation for the great mystery of its original in- 
ception in the human mind. 

The first of these sub-theories, as they may be called, 
supposes that the natural caves of the earth have furnished 
the first and principal suggestions of architecture. Those 
who adopt this theory point to the fact that the most 
famous ancient shrines of India, such as those at Elephan- 
tine and Ellora, are rock-temples, artificial excavations, or 
ornamented caverns ; and that many of the ancient monu- 
ments of Egypt are tomb-temples constructed by driving 
horizontal caverns into the rock-walls of the Nile; and 
that most of the ancient temples of Greece and Eome 
were perfectly dark cells, square, or oblong, surrounded 
by columns ; mere imitations in the open air of the dark 
rock-temples of India and Egypt. The body of a Grecian 
temple is called its cella. But it is not a certain fact that 
the rock-temples of India are its most ancient edifices ; the 
topes of the Jains are probably some of them much older. 
We have lately been informed of the existence of temples 
built in the open air near Memphis much older than all the 
known cave-temples of Upper Egypt. In China we have 
no evidence of any such antiquity in the case of rock- 
temples ; and in Europe and Africa all the most ancient 
Druid monuments are either barrows or ranges of stand- 
ing stones set up* in the open air. If then we can discover 
some other and better reasons for the darkness of the Greek 
and Roman temple cella, the theory of which we speak 
loses its principal support. Here Geology comes to our 
aid and tells us that the earliest places of human sepulture 
were natural caves, ceiled up to eternal darkness. After- 
wards, when men became partially civilized, they ex- 
cavated artificial caverns for tombs; but left them un- 
adorned. At the next stage of human life upon the planet 
these cave-tombs were ornamented first by painting, and 
afterwards by sculpture more and more elaborate. At a 
' 14 



210 THE ORIGIN OF [LECT. 

still later age mankind began to erect tombs in the open 
air, especially on plains, near the great cities, far from any- 
rock- walls or mountain- sides, and still they built them 
dark. Thus we arrive at those great monuments, the 
pyramids. To these, at length, they added porches and 
porticoes, such as you see in front of the Second Pyramid. 
And, finally, these porticoes suggested the construction of 
temples separate from the tombs ; and thus the compli- 
cated and elaborate system of more modern architecture 
took its rise. 

The second theory which I will mention has fewer advo- 
cates. It supposes that the idea of grand architecture 
arose in the human mind from beholding those great ranges 
of natural basaltic columns which are common in volcanic 
countries. The advocates of this theory are obliged to 
rely almost entirely upon the classic styles of architecture 
for its support. They point to Doric and Ionic faQades, 
and the splendid peristyle temples of Greece and Italy. 
But it is only necessary to call to mind that the earliest 
temple of which we know, namely, that one lately opened up 
by Mariette, at a distance of 30 yards south-east from the 
great sphinx, has magnificent ranges of columns in its m- 
terior. That it was built by the king I have named, 
Chephren, the third king of the 4th dynasty, and therefore 
almost at the opening of ancient Egyptian history, is 
proved by a multitude of facsimile statuettes found in a 
well attached to it, all of them stamped with the name of 
that monarch in a cartouche ; in fact, the earliest specimens 
of sculptured figures, with dates upon them, yet dis- 
covered. It is built in the form of the letter T, and its 
immense roof is sustained by two rows of huge, square pil- 
lars of rose granite along the nave, supporting an archi- 
trave of alabaster; while a third row of similar pillars 
runs along the middle of the transept. Its immense age 
and the unsophisticated manners of that earliest day -are 
signalized by the severity, the methodistical simplicity of 
the whole interior. Not an ornament, not a letter is to be 
seen; and it confirms an incidental assertion of Strabo, 
that in Egypt there used to be temples of a barbarous 
style, supported by rows of columns, and wholly unorna- 
mented. I will explain, in a future lecture, his epithet 
1 barbarous/ 



VIII.] ARCHITECTURE. ' 211 

The rock-temples of India also, although of far inferior 
antiquity, are supported within by rows of columns elabor- 
ately sculptured. Why should we suppose the early archi- 
tects were necessitated to copy the rare instances of fine 
basaltic escarpments, when the necessity for pillars to sup- 
port a roof arises immediately from the enlargement of 
the cave. The transition from columns within to columns 
without the temple is the easiest imaginable. But we will 
find other reasons for rejecting this theory when we come 
to consider the idea of the column itself, which stood to 
the ancient mind for a symbol, quite apart from the temple. 
The column was a divine statue, — a deity. It was so in 
all the early ages, to all the ancient peoples ; and it was 
magnificently so employed, with finer and finer effects, as 
mythologies were born and married to each other. The 
standing stones of the Druids ; the Lot's Wives and 
Weeping Niobes of the poets ; the straight processions of 
deity-headed pillars at Carnac ; the range of eight Doric 
columns before the Parthenon; and the circles of twin- 
columns in churches of a later age, were all generated 
from the myth of men and women turned to stone, termini 
and Caryatides, gods and priests, standing gigantic and 
solemn, in orderly silence, within or around the temple of 
the deity. The proofs of this assertion are too voluminous 
to lay before you at the end of a lecture ; but no true 
generalization upon ancient art would be half complete 
without its distinct recognition. 

There is a third theory which I must allude to briefly, 
because it has obtained many supporters in England, 
especially since the discovery of the Lydian and Carian 
monuments in the early part of this century. It supposes 
that all ancient architecture originated in an enlargement 
to public purposes of the private cottage. The theory 
depends almost entirely on Grecian art for its illustrations, 
and therefore is of very limited scope, neglecting most of 
the architectural records of Asia and Africa and Western 
Europe. It relies upon the form of the Grecian pediment, 
and the ornamentation of its architrave. The Greek 
builder was under the necessity of roofing his temples 
against a northern sky. Snow fell in Greece, and the 
pitched roof and over-hanging eves were necessaries. 
These were supported by horizontal beams, like a fisher's 



212 THE ORIGIN OP [LECT. 

hut ; the ends of the beams stuck out, and were split by 
the weather; the rain-drops stood in beads below their 
edges ; hence the Grecian triglyph ornaments ; they were 
mere representations of the beam-ends and rain-drops in 
stone. Just so you will see long dental shadows cast from 
the alternate projecting tiles upon the side walls of the 
houses in Southern France, and then these shadows imi- 
tated in stone around the eves of the Cathedral Church of 
Toulouse. But suppose all this true, it is only the history 
of one part of the ornamentation of one style of architec- 
ture, and that of a very recent age. The great Doric 
temples at Paestum are supposed to have had no roofs, and 
yet they had end pediments. Besides, the pediment itself 
is a religious symbol, apart from all necessity for a roof. 
It represented the pyramid, as the column represented the 
obelisk. In the pediment the Greeks placed the statues 
of their gods. It was their Olympus. But the Greek gods 
were men of a still older time, and the Greek pediment 
had come to be the Olympus of their gods, only because 
the previous pyramids had been the tombs of kings. And 
so with the architrave under it. It was not the string- 
piece of a house, laid on the top of a wall to sustain the 
roof; it was a separate and ancient symbol by itself; it 
replaced in the modern Greek art the far more ancient 
flaring cornice and cord-moulding of the Egyptian temples. 
In fact, all these theories, based upon the local styles of 
Greece, have lost their credit with archaeologists since the 
discovery of the so-called ( proto-doric x style of Egypt. 
The Greeks got all the essential ideas of their Doric archi- 
tecture from the ancient Egyptians ; and all the variations 
of it which are called Ionic from the ancient Babylonians 
and Assyrians. This is now so well made out that it is a 
generally accepted truth. 

The last and fourth theory of the rise of architecture 
which I need mention is still more local in its application 
than the preceding, and therefore as a general theory still 
less acceptable. It supposes that the first idea of grand 
architecture came from the woods ; from overhanging trees 
forming long, lofty vistas to the eye, closed at the farther 
end with interlacing boughs and leafy tracery. Behold a 
Gothic church ! See how its piers arise on either hand 
like mighty trees ! See how the ribs meet over-head ! 



VIII.] THE ORIGIN OF ARCHITECTURE. 213 

See the west window with its hundred mullions !' What 
can be more evident than that the architect had trod the 
forest aisles, and built them o'er again in stone ! It is a 
pity to retire from such a phantasy. Nor need we. The 
last of all architecture must not only include all that went 
before it, but involve new elements of beauty. The free- 
masons of Germany and France were princelike poets, and 
they introduced into the grim conventional grandeurs of 
the Egyptian art, and into the cold perfect chastity of 
Grecian art, sweet humours and warm blood, fresh from 
the heart of nature. They were Christians ; while their 
Grecian ancestors were pagans ; and the old Egyptian fore- 
runners of all were dwellers in the tombs. They broke up 
the massive piers into reedy clustered columns, and shot 
their branching tops into mid-air to meet in bunches of 
foliage. They covered up the faces of the damned old 
gods, of the box-shaped capitals, with leaves and flowers, 
so that the tender bosoms of their children might not heave 
with terror as they passed them by in advancing towards 
the altar, where the Lamb of God was taking away the sins 
of the whole world. They let into the dark old tomb-like 
temple all the heaven of the sky, all the warmth of the sun, 
with healing in its beams; and painted the clerestory with 
a universal rainbow ; promising, by all the angels, saints, 
and martyrs in those windows, that wrath should be for- 
gotten. Then they went forth and built tall towers ; and 
from their tops shot spires far into heaven, covered like- 
wise with angels and with roses ; and hung therein whole 
chimes of bells to drive away all evil, and shower down 
in music the blessings of the upper and eternal spheres. 

Thank God for these cathedrals ! And for their loving- 
hearted, large- souled, Caucasian Christian architects. They 
builded on the ruins of foregoing styles, out of the genius 
of foregoing days ; but in the new dispensation of a su- 
perior beauty and a diviner truth. 



214 



LECTURE IX. 

THE GEOWTH OP THE ALPHABET. 

Men must have lived a long time upon the earth before 
they invented an alphabet. It is a wonderful product of 
the senses, the fancy, and the understanding co-operating. 
Its use by any people proves that that people has been 
civilized. If this be true now, it must have been true at 
the beginning. Thinking men set so high a value on 
letters that they have been disposed to deny man's genius 
the ability to invent them, and have therefore affirmed that 
God gave Adam letters in Paradise. But the genius of 
man, as it grew and developed its resources, was capable 
of all things necessary. If the creative plan, revealed in 
other parts of the creation, was to find its consummation 
in the development, of human life, through all its stages, 
upward, to the highest civilization, then the germs of liter- 
ature were planted early, and appeared in due time. The 
only questions modern science feels called upon to ask are : 
how ? in what forms first ? and afterwards ? 

I said, in my last lecture, that the first efforts of man- 
kind to express the aesthetic sentiments were made in the 
direction of sculpture and architecture, under the guidance 
of certain obscure ideas, which I did not attempt then to ex- 
plain. This I attempt to-night, because these same obscure 
ideas became openly and plainly embodied afterwards in 
literature. They decided, in fact, the shapes of the first 
letters, and the modes adopted by the earliest sculptors and 
architects for giving a plainer meaning to their images and 
temples. What I mean to assert is, that the art of letters 
grew out of the arts of sculpture and architecture, and that 
we have no trustworthy clue through the mysteries of the 



THE GROWTH OF THE ALPHABET. 215 

origins and growths of alphabets, until we have learned to 
comprehend the mysteries of primeval architecture. 

The first architects were beyond all doubt those religious 
teachers who civilized and intellectualized the races to 
which they belonged. Philology teaches us this much, if 
nothing more. The Greek word for a poet, ttoltjttjs, in- 
volves the Greek verb iroietv, to make or build. But the 
word poet is the same as the word bard, and the Hebrew 
word for cutting, carving, making, creating, was Bora. 
So the old northern name for a poet, s-kald, is repre- 
sented by the ancient Egyptian words s-kar, to cut,* and 
s-yjir, to make. The old Egyptian word bak, to carve, be- 
came in time the Latin fac-io, and the German and English 
mach-en. The high priest of Kome was called its pontifex 
rnaximus, or chief builder of arches or bridges. f 

But there are other strange combinations of these func- 
tions of the priest and the temple-builder. The oldest 
Druid temples we know of are circles of stones. The 
Greeks called circles kvkXoi, dropping the r. The word 
seems to have been originally kir-kir, or KeX-KeA ; for in all 
languages the letters r and I are confounded and exchanged 
one for th*e other. Now the oldest of all architectural 
edifices throughout the Mediterranean countries, except 
Egypt, are old walls and ruined buildings of immense 
stones, called Cyclopean. I cannot go into the discussion 
of the nature of the Cyclops, but I think it can be proved 
that they were the representatives, in fable, of the wild 
Druid priests of the circles of standing stones, like Stone- 
henge, from which we get our word for church, or kirk. J 
In archaic Grecian times all the poets before Homer and 
Hesiod were grouped into one class, representing a hoar 
antiquity. They were known as the kvkXlk (cyclic) poets, 
the poets or bards of the circle. The earliest of them all 
was called Arctinus, or the Arkite. Their themes were 
exclusively Arkite ; their poetry is described by the Greeks 

* Compare English 'to scar ;' Welsh mountain-sides, scars. 

t vjft hs, to sing, a bard. Man squatting, wrapped up. Sarcophagus 
\\ of an^-hepi. British Museum. Bunsen's Ideograph, 104. 
Compare Hs-iri, Osiris, and his picture, Ideograph, 130. The judge is 
still more strongly marked than the poet. He sits in a bath of water. J&~ 
He is called stm, meaning judge, one who hears truth. D. 34. Ideo- ^V 
graph, 97. In Ideograph 27, the panther skin replaces the water. ^Sfi^ 

X See the whole discussion from Bozzel in Leinpriere. (B. 52. 32.) 



216 THE GKOWTH OF [LECT. 

of a later day as rude, like that of the Welsh bards ; their 
style was Egyptian-like in its stiffness and severe sim- 
plicity. Their sphere of thought was bounded by the 
magic circle of primeval mythology ; their line vanishes 
into the dim background of Grasco- Asiatic literature ; one 
of them, called the Ethiopian, sang of Memnon. They 
were entirely different from the poets who sang the wars 
of Greece : the historians, comedists, and love- song writers 
of a later age. To the Greeks of Plato's day, their poems 
corresponded to the Psalms of David in our sacred Scrip- 
tures, or to the hymns of the Kig- Veda in the Hindu Scrip- 
tures. When the Homeric scholiasts quoted them, they 
simply said ev kvk\<$ Aeyet, ' as it is written in the circle/ 
just as the apostles quoted the books of the Old Testament, 
saying, ( as it is written in the prophets/ 

Proclus thus describes the ancient Epic cycle. I give a 
free translation of his words : ' The Epic cycle is deduced 
from a mixture of heaven and earth, from which came three 
hundred-handed sons, and three Cyclopses. It briefly dis- 
cusses gods and other fabulous things, and contains some 
history. It is ended by the labour of many poets at the 
murder of Ulysses, by his unconscious son Telegon. Its 
hymns are still studied, not for the sake of virtue, but for 
the good order of its facts. And it preserves the names 
and countries of its bards/ 

Let me give you one of those ancient sagas, — the story 
of Pelops. ' In Sipylus in Phrygia there once reigned a 
wicked king Tantalus, son of Jupiter ; he had two children, 
Pelops and Mobe. At first the gods were his friends and 
feasted at his house ; but he committed two great sins, for 
which he was sent to hell, where he remains, standing up 
to his lips in water, unable to obtain a drop to quench his 
raging thirst, while a great rock, suspended over his head, 
threatens every moment to fall and crush him. His prime 
offence was that of divulging to mortals the secrets of the 
gods, which he heard at his own table. His second offence 
was the diabolical trick which he played upon his Olympian 
guests, in cooking his own boy Pelops and serving him up 
as a ragout, to see if their omniscience would discover 
what it was they ate. Mercury restored the boy to life, 
but could not recover his shoulder, which had been already 
eaten. So he made the boy a new shoulder of ivory. His 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 217 

fresh, beauty now ravished the heart of Neptune, who 
carried him, in his own golden chariot, to the top of 
Olympus, until the rest of the enraged deities, after a furi- 
ous knock-down and drag-out fight in the royal dining- 
hall, had settled his father's hash; then he was carried 
back, to rule in his father's stead. His descendants for 
three generations reigned in Argos ; that means the Pelo* 
ponnesus (Pelops' ship, or Pelops' isle). And his bones 
were afterwards taken to Troy, and became the Palladium 
of that unhappy town. His sister Niobe had all her 
children killed by Diana, and she herself was turned into 
stone, and still sits weeping on a mountain in Phrygian 

There is no disputing the theory, that in all the items of 
this story (and it is only an example of the whole class of 
Cyclopean poems) there rules a reference to some original 
history like that which the Hebrew poets have embodied in 
the story of Noah and Mount Ararat. Tan-tal-us repre- 
sents the Toe, or mountain, submerged to its very lips. 
The stone above his head is the ark about to touch the 
mountain-top. Tantalus is in Tartarus ; is, in fact, the same 
as Tartarus, the place of Torture, the cavern in the 
mountain, the home of mysteries, and horrors, and woes, 
the holle, hole, or hell of the Germanic nations. Niobe, the 
daughter of the mountain, is again the ark, turned to stone; 
her name, Niob, is the Egyptian word 0e/3, the ark of 
Osiris, and the Hebrew word Theba, Noah's ark. The 
Greek Taurus, a mountain, is the Arabic tel or tol, a 
mountain. But the Shemitic nations wrote all their words 
backward from right to left, and so this word tol becomes 
lot, whose wife (her name is no where given) was also 
turned, like Niobe, to stone. Pelops, Niobe' s brother, was 
the Noah of the story. First, his father offered him up to 
the gods, as the Brahma of the Hebrews offered up his 
son Ikswaca (Isaac) . Neptune, or the rising deluge, carried 
him up in the golden car (the ark) to the top of Olympus, 
until his father was destroyed, that is, until the Ararat was 
sunk to his very lips in the hell of waters. Then he was 
restored. His descendants reigned in Argos ; they were 
priests of Arkism. He himself became the divinity of the 
Tor, the city of Troy. And so on, ad infinitum, et ad nau- 
seam. 

I did not intend to introduce the subject of mythology 



218 THE GROWTH OF [LECr. 

so early in this course of lectures. It will claim our 
attention fully hereafter. But I am forced to it, in 
order to state clearly the true theory of architecture, and 
the true origin of the alphabet. Architecture began with 
imitations of Tantalus and Niobe and Pelops in stone. 
Architecture began in attempts to build pyramids like 
Ararat, and to place upon their summits shrines of worship 
and houses of God symbolical of the ark. For this purpose 
islands were especially selected because they were sur- 
rounded by the sea. Sometimes even they were said to float, 
as in the case of Delos (tel). The marshes of inundated 
deltas, the level sealike expansions of the desert sands, were 
equal favourites for building places. Where water could not 
otherwise be obtained tanks were dug, and in their centres 
pyramids and temples were erected. Especial use was 
made of every natural peak of rock around which the 
fluvial mud of some great river, like the Ganges, Euphrates, 
Nile, or Rhone, had settled ; and on these the traveller is 
sure to see the ruined temples and monasteries of the old 
religions converted now into Christian churches, wherever 
Christianity has taken possession of the ground.* 

Old books on architecture are full of definitions of this 
or that style. Until recently none but the so-called classic 
styles were recognized as genuine architecture. All else 
was merely barbarous. The classic styles were those of 
Greece and Home, — Doric, and Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, 
and Composite. But when Bruce and Belzoni discovered 
Doric columns in Upper Egypt, and Layard and Lassen 
Ionic capitals on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, 
writers on architecture began to take larger views of the 
subject. When Daniels published his magnificent plates 
of the Pagodas of India, and Kingsborough and Stephens 
made known to the world the Egyptian-like edifices of central 
America; when other travellers had brought to notice the 
monuments of Thibet and China, the immense statues and 
Cyclopean walls of the Pacific islands, and the Druid 
Tolmens of the Sahara desert, — then it became possible 
for Fergusson to write on architectural science a text-book 

* The pyramid of Cheops is said to be built on such a rock. Another, 
a ledge of rock in situ, is seen in the floor of the Mosque of Omar. St 
Michael's Mounts. See the St George's of the Delta of the Rhone, &c, 
and those back of Aries. 



IX.] THE ALPHABET, 219 

as far in advance of old Vitruvius, as Ly ell's Principles 
and Dana's Geology are in advance of the local classifica- 
tions of Werner, or of Baton's Manual. 

Still the great primal principles of architecture, in my 
opinion, have not been clearly stated by any writer. We 
are bewildered by an ever-increasing multitude of pictures. 
We must give up for a moment the study of these details, 
and take a more distant and summary view of the great 
edifices of the world, if we are to detect the aboriginal 
principles of architecture. 

Let us select a Chinese or Thibetan temple, a Hindoo 
pagoda, an Egyptian propylon, and a Norwegian church, 
and set them side by side before us. Now the question 
arises, are there any prime or essential features common 
to them all ? If there be, these common traits must give 
us some clue to the universal meaning of architecture, and 
therefore to its aboriginal ideas. 

I will not delay you in the answer to this question. 
Look at these pictures and you have the evidence before you. 




Fig. 1. Thibetan, Hindu, Egyptian, and Norwegian Fig. 2. An Egyptian 
temples. hieroglyphic. 

These buildings — in their dates and situations so remote 
from one another, in their details of ornamentation so 
different from each other — show, nevertheless, one common 
plan. Each of them consists, as you see, of two chief mem- 
bers — a lower and an upper. The lower member is a 
square pyramid ; the upper member an over-hanging box. 
All the original or religious architectures of the world have 
been framed upon this plan. And I leave it for yourselves to 
judge if it be not the plan you would expect the ancient 
priesthoods to adopt, if we be permitted to suppose that 
the first great fact of human history was some such grand 
catastrophe as that of Noah's flood. The lower member of 
the plan would represent the Ararat ; the upper member 
would represent the ark that rested on its summit. 

But subdivision is the universal primary mode of growth, 
as all oologists well know. Every germinal cell first elon- 



220 THE GROWTH OP [LECT. 

gates and then parts in the middle to form two, which in 
turn elongate, separate, and form four. These four form 
eight, and so on through eternity. Thought, too, obeys 
this law of matter. The first mythology must be, in course 
of time, extended and bisected, like all other living things. 
The creation is an apothecary's counter ; heresy is its 
golden spatula. 

We must investigate the rise of some great schism in 
mythology, which produced also a great first schism in 
architectural ideas, resulting in a two-fold historic develop- 
ment of the original plan. 

While the single pyramidal j)ile, with the single shrine 
upon its apex, continued tcTbe, in China, in Thibet, and in 
India, the type of the religious edifice, there arose in 
Egypt, and spread throughout the European world, a du- 
plicated type of temple — two mountains side by side, two 
arks upon their tops. The earliest Egyptian monuments 
are single ; those of the middle and later empires are 
double. Two vast propylsea tower side by side to form 
the portal of that immense group of courts and shrines 
which we call the temple of Karnak at Thebes. 

In modern times the Christian cathedrals were built 
upon this plan, but with a difference. Instead of the 
twin towers being themselves capped with two arks, a 
single ark or nave was placed between them. Look at the 
huge s'quare Roman towers at the west end of the Abbey 
of Jumieges, near Rouen ; at the great west-end Norman 
towers of William the Conqueror's abbey-church for men 
in Caen ; at the Gothic towers of Notre Dame, in Paris ; at 
Wren's west towers of Westminster; at all the most 
celebrated cathedrals of western Europe, some of which 
have been completed during our own lives. It is the plan 
of Christendom. 

What explanation now has history, or natural history, to 
offer of this singular departure from the original type of 
temple ? Does it mark the origin and growth of that nice 
aesthetic function of the mind, which we call symmetry ? 
Is it related to the rise of those obscure but natural specu- 
lations of the old mythologists, which resulted in the spread 
of Phallic worship, and which duplicated all the gods of 
Egypt and Greece, and laid the foundation for the early 
speculations of philosophers respecting the male and female 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 221 

elements of force in nature ? or does it stand in evidence 
of the first attempts of the human intellect to oppose 
dualism to unity, and satisfy the human soul with a philo- 
sophy that shall explain the origin of evil without detract- 
ing from the goodness of omnipotence ? At all events, I 
think I can convince you it was no mere accident. 

Perhaps, if we could discover why the Hebrew story of 
the deluge, written in southern Syria, went to the borders 
of the Caspian Sea, to Armenia, to select a mountain for 
its scenery, we might solve the riddle. The Armenian 
Ararat (see Fig. 3) is an extinct volcano, rising directly 



Fig. 3. Mount Ararat in Armenia. 

from the surface of an immense plain to the distinguished 
height of 13,000 feet. The plain is itself 3000 feet above 
the sea ; all the upper part of the mountain is therefore 
within the limits of perpetual snow. But it is not a single 
cone ; it is grandly duplicated ; and in the notch between 
the cones tradition says the ribs of the old ship still sleep; 
but woe to the mortal who attempts to reach its dreadful 
resting-place ! 

The cones are of unequal height, one being 13,300, the 
other only 9500 feet above the bed of the Araxes, flowing 
through the plain. ' Nothing can be more beautiful than 
its shape/ writes Morier, ' or more awful than its height. 
All the surrounding mountains sink into , insignificance 
when compared to it. It is perfect in all its parts ; no 
hard, rugged feature ; no unnatural prominences ; every- 
thing is in harmony, and all combine to render it one of 
the sublimest objects in nature/ And we may well add, 



222 THE GEOWTH OP [lECT. 

one of the most terrible. It is a sleeping lion. In the 
earthquake of 1 840, which lasted from June until Septem- 
ber, masses of rock and ice were thrown from the upper 
cones, 6000 feet at a single bound, covering portions of the 
plains below with desolation.* 

It seems to have been this splendid object that cap- 
tivated the fancy of the human race as it moved westward 
along the historic belt of emigration. Mount Masius, 
the Damavend, Mount Meru, the Sufued Koh,f Adam's 
peak in Ceylon,J and all those other typical diluvial sum- 
mits of central and eastern Asia were but single peaks, 
and satisfied the transcendental idea of a mountain. This 
double cone of Ararat (or the two Ararats, as they are 
called,) produced a ripple in the stream of tradition, divided 
it, and gave birth to the second grand order of duplicated 
architecture^ 

There must have been among the early masons the same 
diversity of natural temperament as now exists among their 
representatives. One class would be idealists, and claim 
that the true prototype and divine original was the moun- 
tain idea in its absolute unity. Another party, more 
sensuous and literal, and perhaps more artistic, would de- 
vote themselves to the expansion of that first idea, and 
to the imitation of the actual Ararat, producing all their 
forms in double series. Thus even the Druid barrow came 
to be elongated and furnished with a peak at either end ; 
for it is scarcely disputed now that the long barrows are of 
a later age than the round mounds. Thus, also, in Italy, 
the pediment was split into two, and the urn was placed 



* See Major Voskoboinikof's report in the Athenaeum for 1841, p. 157; 
quoted in Kitto, sub voc. 

f Or White Mountain, on the road to Peshawur and Cabul. Opposite 
it is Noorgill, or Kooner, a towering hill. Here the Affghans set the 
Ark. o; (Burne's Travels in Bokhara, i. p. 117.) 

% The Samaritan Pentateuch gives in Gen. viii. 4, Sarandib, which is 
the Arabic name of Ceylon. 

§ B-ffK 'The mountains of Ararat? It is nowhere a Bible name for a 
mountain. Gen. viii. 4. See only elsewhere 2 Kings xix. 37 ; Is. xxxvii. 
38 ; and Jer. li. 27. It must have been east of M esopotamia ; see Gen. 
xi. 2, and Kitto's fine argument. In the Sibylline verses the mountains of 
Ararat are in Phrygia ; A-napta in Phrygia was called by Greeks ki^ojtoq, 
the Ark, because enclosed by three rivers in the shape of an ark. 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 223 

between its peaks, instead of on the summit of the- pedi- 
ment. (See Fig. 4.) 




Fig. 4. The Pediment, split to receive the Urn ; and the Hour-glass. 

We are now prepared to speak of ' styles/ and to study 
architecture in detail. 

Every race, almost every nation, developed the Arkite | 
plan, whether single or double, in a separate style : a style 
of its own, or a composition of the styles of its neighbours 
and of preceding ages. Nothing human remains un- 
changed, except fundamental ideas. The whole effort of 
nature is to put forth buds and branches on every side, so 
as to realize an idea to the utmost. Nature has no sympa- 
thy with our purist prejudices. She is no quaker. She 
never grows cold and stupid. She is never consistent ; 
she is always ready to go back and begin again, as water, 
when stopped by some obstruction, finds new channels 
that suit it quite as well. Every style has had its own 
particular and peculiar beauties ; and every style has 
begun in simplicity and grown composite ; or become de- 
graded, as we choose to say. Every original symbolical 
form has been taken up by the apprentices of the master- 
mason who invented it, and been elaborated, and intens- 
ified, and repeated, and varied, in all possible ways, and 
combined with other symbols, until its personal identity 
has become lost amid the crowd of similar forms; until its 
nature has been perverted, and its meaning contradicted, 
and its eminence exchanged for degradation, aud its- 
beauty bartered for some cheap utility. 

As in eastern lands the slave becomes sultan, and the 
sons of princes have their eyes put out and become beggars 
in the streets, so in architectural styles the fisher's skiff 
has risen to be a cathedral, and the pyramid of Cheops 
sunk to become the chamfered point of a graveyard obelisk. 

It was in obedience to this organic law of redupli- 
cation and variation, that the primitive symbolism of 



224 THE GEOWTH OF [LECT. 

architecture developed itself. You remember tlie story of 
the Apostle Paul and the silversmiths of Ephesus, whose 
trade was to make shrines for the great goddess Diana. It 
is understood by antiquarian scholars that these shrines 
were small portable models of the Ephesian Temple, perhaps 
intended for private oratories, like those plaster shrines 
of the Virgin Mary, which good Roman Catholics buy 
every day to place upon their dressing-tables or mantle- 
pieces. So in the earliest times, the more celebrated 
monuments of architectural magnificence were thus re- 
duced for private devotion. 

The same desire to duplicate the symbol provoked the 
manufacture of ornaments in the shape of temples ; orna- 
ments not only for the person, but for the temples them- 
selves. A modern instance of this application of art is to 
be seen in York minster, in the centre of which, and hung 
midway between the vaulted ceiling and the floor, or, 
rather, I should say, supported in that position by an 
arch-like partition in the church, called a rood loft, is seen 
the great organ, a model of the cathedral itself. Just so, 
in ancient times, the idea of a truncated pyramid support- 
ing an ark-like cornice was thinned down to the idea of a 
square column supporting a box-shaped capital. 

• We must start all architecture from the Pyramid ; as we 
must draw from Ararat, or some other sacred mountain, the 
source of all mythology, g J^- g [^ was the old Egyptian 

or hieroglyphic name for a pyramid. All architecture was 
in its beginnings bar-bar-ous, that is, pyramidal. The term 
was afterwards extended in its meaning, by the Greeks, to 
include all other objects foreign to their refined tastes and 
their artistic religion. They called the Thracians, the 
Phrygians, the Syrians barbarians, although in many 
respects more advanced in civilization than themselves, not 
because these nations committed savage acts, or erected 
less magnificent monuments than the Greeks themselves, 
but because these nations, in their religious architecture, 
and in their superstitious rites, preserved a large measure 
of that Arkite or pyramidal mythology which took its 
name from the pyramid or BAR-BAR of old Egypt.* 

* TlLpiitpig (homo) dk tan Kar 'EMaflf, yXaxraav Ka\bg KayaQoQ. Herod. 
II. 143. Uhlmann, in his De Veterum Egyptorum lingua et litteris, 



TX.] THE ALPHABET. 225 

The same origin is to be assigned to the obelisk, the 
Egyptian name of which, however, was T^N. Some have 
talked absurdly enough about its being a representation of 
the forthputting power of nature. Others have supposed 
it an invention of the fire-worshippers to represent a flame. 
But the first appearance of fire-worship in Egypt dates 
back no farther than the 17th dynasty, and soon became 
a detested heresy; while there are obelisks of the 12th 
dynasty. 

The obelisk was merely a portable, or idealized, or ad- 
junct pyramid. It stood isolated in front of the pyramidal 
propylon. When the propylon was duplicated the obelisk 
was duplicated also. All obelisks are terminated above in 
a genuine minute pyramid. 

The same origin is to be assigned to the solitary 
column in other lands, or to the pairs of columns, like those 
which stand before the rock-temples of India. Solomon 
made two to stand before his sanctuary in Jerusalem, 
calling the one Boaz and the other Jachin. And the Jews 
were accustomed to plant two trees in every garden to re- 
present these columns. 

We reach next, in order of development, the arcade. 
The Egyptians had already used it for their inside galleries 
and temple-halls. The Greeks and Romans, obliged to 
roof their sacred edifices, placed it outside, underneath the 
gable end or pediment ; increasing the number of columns 
from four to six and eight, and finally carrying whole 
ranges of them around the temple cella. The pediment 

p. 31, suggests that Herodotus was led to this etymology by the Egyp- 
tian (or Coptic) expressions <ppnoo&, pulcher, fxrji, Justus esse. But I think 
it quite possible that Herodotus rather gave the Egyptian sentiments re- 
specting the pyramid, as the oldest, most sacred, best, and most beautiful 
thing in the world. On .page 27 Uhlmann thinks, from the fact that the 

Egyptian pyramus is in Arabic .*„&, that the py is no essential part of the 

word, but only the Coptic article; while papa is the Egyptian word for 
height, as it is in Hebrew (Kirch. Scala. M. 49). Compare Rossii Etym. 
iEgypt. 159. Kitto's Bibl. Diet. Other etymologies have been proposed, 
such as 7r-o8po-/3a, sepulchre of kings, but the subject is still in the dark. 
Comparative philologists, however, will agree with me that vvp-p.id is 
directly convertible into (3ap-(3ap, or vice versa, and that in the absence of 
any universally accepted etymology for irvpafxiq, the Egyptian synonyme 
given in the text above is perfectly good ground for a new theory to stand 
upon. 

15 



226 THE GEOWTH OE [LECT. 

which they supported was but another pyramid elevated in 
the air. The words 'pyramid and pediment are the same 
in their alphabetic elements. It was in the tympanum 
of the pediment that the. Greeks assembled the images 
of their Olympic deities.* The whole roof of the Grecian 
temple, although so different in outside form, was, in the 
general plan, identical with the upper or ark member of 
the structure. The Romans, not content with this, went 
one step farther, and placed upon the peak of the pediment 
an URN. 

I must stop for a moment to enforce the argument I am 
pursuing with a definition of this remarkable word. We 
think that it is merely the Latin urna, which has become 
the property of all the Eomanic languages. But, in fact, 
the Latins received it from the East. It is nothing more 
or less than the Hebrew name for the Ark of the Covenant, 
arn (p$$) . But we can go still farther back. It was the 
Egyptian name for the cartouche. 

Now the cartouche is an oval enclosure containing the 
hieroglyphic letters which make a royal name. The 
Pharaoh in his sarcophagus or urn was symbolized by his 
name in its cartouche or ARN. The Romans merely applied 
the word to express a coffer of peculiar shape made to 
preserve the ashes of the dead. The modern urn is the 
lineal descendant of the symbolic sarcophagus of Osiris, 
and of the ark of Noah. 

Look at its peculiar shape (Fig. 4) . It consists of a com- 
bination of the same two members, the ark upon the 
mountain top, which I before described as constituting the 
essential parts of every piece of architecture. This urn 
the Romans placed upon the top of the temple pediment. 

Architects have capped the temple with a dome to du- 
plicate and make more eminent the representation of the 
mountain, and have placed on top of this a lily, a pine apple, 
a lantern or cupola, to represent again the ark. The Mo- 
hammedans have chosen the more appropriate ship symbol 
of the crescent. 

The same compound symbol is seen inside the churches 
of Christians in three forms : first, in the altar (al-tor, 
the mountain), and upon it the communion cup ; secondly, 

* Compare the cap on the head of Perseus, ornamented with figures 
of the deities. 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 227 

in the baptismal font, upon its spreading sculptured base ; 
and thirdly, in the pulpit, with its ark-like box, from which 
the preacher prophesies, and with its quaintly- carved stem 
below. Its very name pulpit is convertibly identical with 
pyramid and pediment. 

I leave a fruitful theme, capable of infinite and delight- 
ful illustration ; as any one may see who enters one of the 
modern Catholic churches, built under the supervision of 
the Jesuit priests, where, especially about the sanctuary, 
symbol is piled on symbol, each one the mere repetition of 
the other, until the eye is wearied with confusion and the 
taste disgusted with excess. 

Let us go back again to earlier times, when moderation 
and simplicity still kept the symbolic shape of ornaments 
sharply cut and easy to be recognized. Let us take for a 
good specimen to study, the Doric column. 

The Doric Style, so called, was not invented by that 
small tribe of Grecian people called the Dorians. As I 
have already stated, it is found in Upper Egypt, in archi- 
tecture of great antiquity. It would almost be just to say 
that the Dorians were called after it. They were worship- 
pers of the Tor; and the Doric column became in their 
hands the purest, simplest, noblest, and most beautiful of 
all the forms that the architectural idea has ever assumed. 
Look at it. Poets and painters have vied with each other 
in exhausting the vocabulary of admiring epithets, to de- 
scribe its severe simplicity, its exquisite symmetry, its 
graceful majesty, the charm of its lights and shadows, the 
serenity of its unconscious strength ; the delicacy of its 
capital, yielding to the pressure above, yet sustaining the 
crushing weight; and the vertical contrast to the horizontal 
architrave, of its fluted shaft, rising out of the expanded 
marble floor of stilobate like an island-mountain from the 
placid surface of the sea. For that is just what it was 
meant to represent. Therefore the Doric column has no 
base. And therefore, also, the Doric column is channeled 
like a mountain with valleys. The Doric channels are the 
ravines descending to the water; their shape is quite differ- 
ent from that of the Ionic or Corinthian flutes. 

Remember that we are dealing with a product of the 
fancy ! Remember, also, that the early fancy of mankind 
was a heated fancy, and had lost none of its fire in the time 



228 THE GEOWTH OF [LECT. 

of Pericles. It was a religious fancy, an unscientific fancy, 
an enthusiastic fancy, a fancy sticking at nothing by which 
it could reach its symbolistic ends. At all events, it was 
no modern, materialistic, cynical, critical, mechanical, 
steam-engine building, Wall-street or State-street jobbing 
fancy. All the history of art tells us that it was finer than 
our judgment of it. 

I have already mentioned the literal exchange of L for 
E all over the world, and the fact that the Greeks and 
Phoenicians said tor and zuu where Arabs said tol and 
tel for mountain. So the Greeks named the shaft of their 
Toric column arvXr] (s-tol), from which we get our English 
word style, through the little column-like pencil with which 
the scribes wrote upon tablets of wax.* Is not this a curi- 
ous illustration of our proposition that the men of letters 
in old times were the architects ? But I will give you now 
a still more curious and significant coincidence. 

The favourite Egyptian hieroglyphic form of the letter 
A was a feather, plume or quill. t It stood at the begin- 




Fig. 5. A ; IU; Goddess Ma ; Truth ; Crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. 

ning of all words the first sound in which was A. But a 
jackal holding a feather was the emblem of a scribe. On 
the head of a sitting goddess the upright feather meant 
historic truth. MA, the goddass of truth, had two feathers 
on her head ; as the shrine had two obelisks before it on 
which were written its history. The double letter, A A, was 
originally, therefore, written with two feathers, which, how- 
ever, iD time came to stand, in the later alphabet, for the 
letter I, or rather the diphthong IU, as in the word Judsea. 
Observe the coincidence ! The Coptic word AA means to 
build. And the old Egyptian name for an edifice is simply 
A, the single letter A. The scribe and the architect were 
one. The temple-wall and the chisel which cut those im- 
mortal hieroglyphics into its surface were one. The 

* The S initial stands for san, Sacred. 

f See Bunsen, p. 556 and 561, and Ideography, No. 174, 173. (Fig. 
5, above.) 



IX.J 



THE ALPHABET. 229 



mountain, tol, became a carpenter's tool; the -column 
dwindled to the engraver's style ; but the soul that lived 
and spoke in all of them never changed ; it was the same 
throughout the series. 

We have been occupied with but one part of the Doric 
column, the shaft or style ; let us now look at the other 
member of it, the capital. There are etymologies con- 
nected with this also. I have said more than once that 
the words tol and toe were the same : here is another 
proof of it. King James's version calls the capitals of 
Solomon's two columns, chapiters. You will find no ety- 
mology of capital in the books, except in the form of a 
reference to the Latin caput, a head, capitalis, principal. 
But capitalis will not explain that other equally Arkite 
word, the name of the Roman capitol, that citadel which 
contained its native gods, its treasures, its recorded laws, 
and the heart's love of the great Republic. Every city of 
any note in the ancient world had a similar citadel, the 
home of its tutelary deities. And what was such a citadel 
called ? An arlc — of course : AEX. And the records 
which it secured — what were they ? — ARChives. 

The capitol of a column, then, is the cap of its tol, or 
style ; the ship upon the mountain-top. And it was pre- 
cisely in the Doric order of architecture, the shaft of which 
represented the mountain idea with most precision, that we 
have a capital most simply and purely representative of the 
ship. When I thus identify cap with ship, it is only what 
is done every day in using words similarly allied, one of 
which retains and the other has lost the initial s : such as 
cup and s-coop ; the farmer calls his cap-like bee-hive a 
s-cap ; the sailor calls the master of his ship a s-Mpper ; 
and the little boat from shore a s-kijf. 

The word cup signifies holding or containing; and in 
such modern words as coop the form of the vessel is not at 
all essential to the meaning. A hencoop is not at all 
cup- shaped, but yet acts the part of a receptacle. And 
even the Latin cap-io, I take or hold, suggests no form. 
But at the beginning the form was essential to the mean- 
ing. The Hebrew word for the palm of the hand, there- 
fore, was cap (ftp), because it throws itself into the form of 
a cup to receive anything. Many names of sacred shrines 
like the Kaaba of Mecca, and the profane little Kaabahs 




230 THE GROWTH OF [LECT. 

which our young ladies find so convenient, are traceable to 
the same root which gave the ship its name. 

Going back beyond the Hebrew use of the word cap, we 
get still clearer light upon its origin ; for the arm stretched 
upward in prayer or oblation, with the palm of the hand 
turned upward, is one of the commonest sights upon the 
monumental walls of Egypt. Look at it for a moment 
(Fig. 6), and see how the Arkite imagination would seize 
upon this living symbol, this Doric column done in flesh 
and blood. The Hebrew word for arm was deo or tor 
(srn).* The hand lifted in prayer was therefore a true 
caph-tor, or capital. There is one very remarkable ideo- 
graph on the Egyptian monuments which can be explained 
in no other way than by reference to these facts. It is 
Bunsen'sNo. 99 (Fig. 6), a man kneeling and hold- 
ing up a basin, with the pronunciation n'ham, and 
the meaning to save. What has the holding up of a 
basin to do with salvation ? Nothing, unless there 
be a reference to the great salvation of Arkite mythology. 

Observe now how our English word arm fits into all this. 
In drawing your attention to it, I am not digressing ; but, 
on the contrary, leading on directly to the main subject of 
this lecture, which I am impatient to enter upon in a more 
systematic manner ; but all these preliminary details were 
necessary, and will come of use. First, let me once more 
insist upon the identity or interchangeability of the liquids 
L and R. Secondly, you must accept Grimm's law as 
equally true, although I cannot stop to prove it in extenso, 
that the labial letters B, P, F, V, the vowel U, and the nasal 
M, are also interchangeable in a certain order in all lan- 
guages and dialects yet studied. Do you not call Maria and 
Mary, Molly and Polly ? Do you not call Martha, Matty and 
Patty ? Margaret becomes Maggy and Peggy, &c. Keep- 
ing this law in mind you will see how the English word 
ABM corresponds with the word ALP, a mountain, pre- 
cisely as the Hebrew dor, an arm, corresponded to the 
Phoenician tor, and the Arabic tel, a mountain. You can 
also see why the Mont Blanc of Greece was called QiLuKpos ; 
and why the mountain beast of Asia with the houdah on 

m jm the arm, the shoulder of an animal, force, strength, &c. ^3 be- 
longs to a different set of ideas, regarding the arm as a weapon, or a tool., 



IX.] 



THE ALPHABET. 



231 



his back was called an JELeBhant ; and why the bull with 
the crescent horns received the Syriac name of ALF. The 
mountain was not named from the arm, the arm was 
named from the mountain, and then only when held up in 
adoration, with some votive offering in its hollow palm. 
The mountain, the alp, was the beginning of all things in 
sacred history. Hence all ancient things were named after 
it. Olympus was the Ararat of Europe, and, curiously 
enough, replaces Ararat on the coat of arms of the Duke de 




Fig. 6. Doric column ; Caphj'n'ham; tam ; escutcheon of Nevers; Crown of 

the Pharaohs. 

Nevers, among the beautiful sculptures in front of the old 
chateau in the middle of that little quaint city (Fig. 6) . The 
most ancient and venerable river in Greece was named 
ALFaios. The aborigines of Europe were called ELVes. The 
Latin word for formerly or in ancient times was OL^M. The 
Hebrew word for eternity, or unknown infinite beginning, 
was OLM. Hence the first letter of the alphabet had to be 
ALF a, or as the Shemites called it, ALF. And its shape also 
had to be Alpine, like its name. The letter A is simply a 
pyramid or mountain with a line drawn across it. In the 
ancient bardic books of Ireland, that seat of the learning 
of old times in the Druidic west, whenever the word moun- 
tain occurred it was not written out in full, but in its place 
they merely wrote a letter A; that was sufficient. 

The science of philology as it now stands is largely made 
up of the results of the investigations of learned men into 
such subjects as these: — What is the whole number of 
distinct sounds which can be uttered by the human organs 
of speech ? What special number of these sounds have 
been selected out of the whole number for use, by different 
races and tribes of men in different countries ? What dis- 
tinction of these sounds can we make into vowels, semi- 
vowels, and consonants ; and of the consonants into sonants 
and surds, aspirates and sibilants, labials, dentals, Unguals, 
gutturals and nasals ? What relation do some of these 



232 THE GROWTH OF [LECT. 

sounds as spoken in one language bear to others of them 
as spoken in another language; in other words, what 
is the real nature of those processes of transmutation, 
permutation, inversion, and reduplication of sounds which 
are all the time going on from generation to generation, 
as the tribes of men meet and influence each other's speech ? 
How can we understand the formation of dialects ? What 
are the true derivations of words ? and what is the range 
of those modifications which time keeps making in the 
meanings of single words ? An immense range of investi- 
gation into which I could not pretend to enter. 

I have been keeping exclusively in view one special 
inquiry : what was the origin of the alphabet ? Why 
were certain figures cut upon the surface of stone walls to 
represent certain sounds which issued from the human 
mouth ? On what principle was this done ? Why, for in- 
stance^ and taking the first letter as it comes, and in its 
archaic Greek or Doric form, why was the vowel sound A 
painted to the eye by two strokes like legs and a third 
stroke across them ? What is there in the sound A to 
suggest such a shape ? Is there any natural connection 
between the two things ? If not, then is there any arti- 
ficial connection between them ; any fanciful connection ? 
If so, what governed the fancy of the man who invented the 
letter A, to cause him to establish such a connection ? 
Could it have been by any possibility an accident ? 

This question, which goes down to the very roots of the 
science, has kept many brains busily thinking in all ages ; 
for the pure and direct tradition of how it was done has 
been lost this long time, and it must be rediscovered in 
very roundabout ways. Nature loves to hide the begin- 
nings of things, and seems to kill off her early creations 
merely for the sake of giving palaeontologists a chance to 
develop their own intellects by the study of the fossils. 
It was a great question in the first centuries of" the Chris- 
tian era when the Talmuds were written, and the Indian 
Puranas, as this pretty Oriental story may show you : — 

When Jesus was a little boy, his mother Mary took him 
by the hand and seated him at the feet of the village school 
master, among the other children of Nazareth. When his 
master looked upon him, he loved him, and stroked his 
curly hair, and called him a good boy, and he should learn 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 233 

his a-b-c's. So lie began to show him alejph, the first letter 
of the alphabet. ' But why is it called aleph ? ' said the 
boy. c Ask not vain questions/ replied his master, kindly; 
'but proceed with the next letter, beth.' 'Not so/ said 
Jesus ; ' I must comprehend the first ; for God maketh 
nothing in vain/ Then, taking all the letters in order, he 
expounded unto his master the significations of all their 
forms.* 

The legend does not inform us what this divine commu- 
nication amounted to. But there is an Armenian version 
of it which gives us some idea of what it was. ( Behold/ 
said Jesus, ' how this letter A is made : the three upright 
strokes signify the three persons of the Trinity ; and the 
stroke which underlies them signifies that these same three 
are one/ To comprehend this part of the legend, how- 
ever, we must notice the shape of the letter in Armenian 
(Fig. 14, p. 240). We must remember then that this legend 
dates not merely from Christian days, but from a time sub- 
sequent to the Athanasian and Arian controversy. It was 
an Athanasian accommodation of the old Arkite trinity to 
the new controversies of the 4th century of the Christian 
era. But it was no mere monkish or scholastic whim. 
It had the essence of the old truth in it. Different as it 
looks, this strange -looking Armenian A has a form which, 
when critically studied, is essentially identical with the 
Cadmean A, the posture of the form only being varied, as 
I shall show directly. 

I must here say, that one of the most remarkable cir- 
cumstances connected with the tradition of the alphabet 
is the apparent indifference which the sculptors and scribes 
who invented the letters exhibited as to whether a letter 
stood upright, or leaned to the right, or to the left, or lay 
upon its side, or was turned topsy-turvy so as to stand 
upon its head. We are not to suppose any greater nicety 
in writing, nor any greater difficulty in reading what was 
written five thousand years ago than now. No doubt 
many an ancient scribe learned to write as badly as Rufus 
Choate ; or as that superintendant of the Michigan Central 
Railroad, whose angry letter of remonstrance and warning 
about keeping his cows off the track was used by the 

* Norton, Yol. iii. p. 270. Discussion of the Marcosian sect of 
Gnostics (W. 54, 2). 



234 THE GROWTH OF [LECT. 

farmer to whom it was addressed,, as a free-ticket on the 
line for a year. 

But there was a far better reason for this indifference 
than carelessness, or that familiarity which breeds con- 
tempt. If the earliest letters were pictorial symbols, it 
did not much matter how they stood, provided the form 
which conveyed the idea was kept clearly before the eye. 
If any one out of several possible postures became a 
specialized and permanent variation, it was because that 
posture of the form could be also made as symbolical as 
the form itself. Such was the case of the arm. It was only 
when the arms were stretched upwards, with the palms 
open, that they could typify adoration, praise, admiration, 
holy rejoicing, and the like. You see it thus expressed in 
the 93rdideograph of Bunsen's list (Fig. 7, p. 235) . Its sound 
was haa ; its meaning ( to rejoice •/ and also the number 
100,000,000. It was used like the Chinese exclamation of 
astonishment, Hai-ah /* To apply this symbol of venera- 
tion or astonishment to a special subject, such as time, some 
addition had to be made to the symbol. A feather (which 
meant history and truth and antiquity) was placed upright 
upon the centre of its head, and then the symbol meant 
one hundred million years, or in other words, an astonish- 
ing length of time. 

But when the arm was not used to express this a I of 
astonishment or veneration, but merely the sound a as it 
issues in a simple and unimportant manner from the mouth, 
or as pronounced at the end of words, and through the 
nose, like the on and m final of the French, or like the nasal 
and final double *aa of the Hebrew — -then the arm was en- 
graved in a horizontal position, at the bottom of the word. 
We see it, for instance, thus in that bilingual inscription of 
'the great Emperor Xerxes/ upon an alabaster vase in 
the cabinet of antiquities in the Royal Library at Paris 
(Fig. 8), which has played as important a part in the 
discovery of the lost key to the ancient Assyrian or Cunei- 

* The 94th, 95th, and 96th ideographs are variations. The arms and 
neck alone, when used with the eagle (a) as a complement (Fig. 7), sig- 
nifies the letter k, or sound ka, as in Jcam, black ; skai, to plough ; kaut, 
to build ; Ka, a bull, goat, to receive ; mfka, copper ; tka, a spark, &c. 
Lamb thinks that it is the Hebrew n turned upside down. See Bunsen's 
Phonetics, p. 562, vol. i. , Egypt. 






n.] 



THE ALPHABET. 



235 



Figure 8. 

Bilingual Inscription of Xerxes, on an Alabaster Vase, 
in the Royal Library at Paris. 

K Sh, H ft "R $K ft . 



Ne H 



Wu Zn R K, 




HAA 



236 THE GEOWTH OP [LECT. 

form writing, as the more celebrated trilingual inscription 
commonly known as the Rosetta stone had previously 
played in Egyptology.* In the upper horizontal range of 
characters, the two letters a, and the two letters S, were 
at once seen to correspond to the two letters A, and the 
two letters Sh, in the hieroglyphic group in the cartouche 
below. In the art of reading a correspondence written in 
cypher, c'est le premier pas qui coute, a right beginning is 
all you want. Get one or two letters of the alphabet, and 
the rest follow as obediently as a skein of thread when you 
have found the right end. But the hieroglyphic A here is 
represented by an eagle. The Egyptians had, in fact, 
three hieroglyphics to express this sound — the single 
feather, the arm, and the eagle. The feather, as I have 
said, standing for the initial long AA of astonishment ; the 
arm standing for the final nasal n aa ; and the eagle stand- 
ing for a sort of gently aspirated h a, which there is no need 
to allude to farther. 

Now what I wish to fix your attention upon is the shape 
of the Cuneiform or Assyrian letter A in this inscription. 
Remember what I have been saying about the apparent 
indifference of the ancient scribes to the position of the 
letters, provided the form was what they wished it to be. 
I do not here allude to the position of the letters in respect 
to one another in the word ; although that, too, is a very 
important point, to which not half enough attention has 
been given in the science of language. For words were 
written indifferently backwards and forwards ; the old 
Greek inscriptions are written alternately backwards and 
forwards, from line to line, as a field is ploughed by 
farmers ; and they actually called that mode of writing, 
( boustrophedon/ that is, v oxen turned/ And you see that 
in this cartouche the Egyptian scribe has done the same 
thing. The fact is, if-. carving the letters preceded the! 
writing of them with a pen, as it probably did, the necessity 
for using a pushing or striking force coming from the right 
hand is apparent. Nothing can be more awkward than 

* See the account of its discovery by St Martin, and its complete dis- 
cussion, in G. Pauthier's ' Essai sur Vorigme et la formation similaire des 
ecritures figuratives chinoise et Egyptiens? Paris, 1842. Part I, p. 124, 
et seq. ' Kshharsha Neh Wuzurk=-Kshairsha Hon Pe Na= Xerxes the 
great Emperor.' 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 237 

writing the Hebrew or Arabic letters ; but nothing is easier 
or more convenient than engraving them, commencing each 
letter from the bottom right-hand corner. The Chinese 
write from the top of the line downwards. On the con- 
trary, the county land- surveyor, now-a-days, writes his field- 
notes upwards, from the bottom of the page to the top. 
All this has caused many dialectic variations in the words 
of cognate languages, which have greatly puzzled philolo- 
gists ; e. g. the Hebrew kol, a voice, is in Greek logos ; the 
Greek gala, milk, is in Latin lac ; and if I had time to go 
through the whole alphabet with you I would have to use 
this law of inversion to explain many things ; as e. g. how 
the Theb, or ark of Noah, came to be pronounced Beth, 
the second letter of the Shemitic alphabet, and Bath ; 
meaning both a house or temple, and a daughter, or the 
virgin goddess of the temple. 

But my object in this course of lectures has been rather 
to state principles, to describe methods of thought, than to 
cram the imagination with detailed facts and subordinate 
results ; and I keep to the discussion of the letter A, not 
for the sake of any special pre-eminence that it may have, 
but as affording a good example of the method which 
governed the alphabet -making mind of antiquity. 

You see, then, that the position of the form of the letter 
itself, that is, its posture, was so variable that it could be 
laid upon its side, and turned over upon its head, ap- 
parently without inconvenience. Mark me, I say apparently, 
not really. Those old wise men knew what they were 
about. Their fancy was as dogmatic as our logic, and loved 
etiquette and punctilio as well as our natural science does. 
If the old Assyrian scribes wrote the letter A thus fTl w ^ n 
three upright strokes and a fourth stroke laid across on top; 
and the Armenian scribes, many centuries afterwards, saw 
fit to reverse their letter A thus (JJ , that is, three upright 
strokes and a fourth laid underneath, — they certainly had 
some dogmatic reason for doing so. And the Marcosian 
legend of the little Jesus tells us what that was; f to 
teach us/ said the little master, ' that the beginnings of all 
things is one essence in three persons.'' But why would not 
the stroke, when drawn above, do as well as when drawn be- 
low ? The Egyptians expressed the emanations from the 
sun, sunlight, by three waved lines descending from a circle 



238 THE GROWTH OF [lECT. 

surrounding a dot; and the ancient Chinese expressed 
spiritual emanations, spirit, genius, genii, by three strokes 
beneath a fourth horizontal stroke. And although this 
figure received- another small horizontal stroke subsequent- 
ly, its meaning remained the same, and has been considered 
so important, that it forms the key to an entire class of 
Chinese words, viz. all those which relate to the spiritual 
intelligence of mankind, the power of expressing thoughts 
in words, the power of giving names to things. Its 
ancient and its modern form are both given in Fig. 9 
below. It is called chi, and means monere, significare, prce- 
cipere, ostendere, respicere, docere, per scripturam signifi- 
care* 

But the Athanasian theology was not so easily satisfied ; 
it had a certain technical expression to employ, viz. ' the 
hype-statical relation of three persons in one God/ If you 
look in Greek dictionaries for the word hypostasis, you will 
be rather astonished to see no theological allusion whatever 
in its meaning ; for it stood to the Greek farmer for no- 
thing but ivine lees. It meant simply what our chemists 
would call a precipitate. But it was made up of two words, 
— hupo, under, and histemi, to stand; and its original 
meaning must have been something fundamental, or at the 
bottom. Angry theologians got to hurling this word at 
each other's heads with this older meaning, which perhaps 
it still retained in the learned world. The hypostatical 
union of the three Divine persons meant their fundamental 
union, their personalities rooted in a common underlying 
substance or substratum. The Scribes could do no less 
than the Pharisees. The letter which had come down to 
them from Assyrian days, bearing its Arkite signification 
of eternity and divinity, the beginnings of things and the 
stuff of the world's phenomena, suited their purpose exactly, 
provided they took the fourth stroke, which joined the 
tops of the other three, and put it below, making it hypo- 
statical, or fundamental. 

Going back now to the Cadmean or Alpine form of the 
letter A, will you demand that I bring it into similar re- 
lationship with the Armenian and Assyrian forms ? The 
demand would be just if I asserted that the Cadmean idea 

* French Dictionary, p. 489. Also see the 113th Key, Kij. 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 239 

of the letter was precisely the same as the Assyrian or 
Armenian idea of it. But all alphabets were not made in 
the same age, nor by the same people,. nor under the same 
set of influences. All I wish to hint this evening is, that, 
taken as a whole, and in the earlier ages of literature, a 
general Arkite mythology governed the fancy of men and 
therefore shaped all their attempts at expressing their re- 
ligious and historical ideas, both in architecture and in 
writing ; and that the traces of this mythology exist under 
all modifications of the forms of letters in all alphabets 
even to the present time. 

The origin of the curious wedge form of the Assyrian let- 
ters has not been explained. The scribes who wrote the 
archives of Nineveh and Babylon upon clay cylinders could 
have made their lines or strokes as straight and smooth as 
the Bomans, who wrote on wax, made theirs. Letters 
made with such skill and care that they cannot be read 
sometimes without the help of a magnifying lens (a proof, 
by the way, that the lens was two or three thousand years 
older than the time of Galileo), show that the writers 
could do anything in the way of neat writing, and 
that they must have been inspired with some special re- 
verence for letters made with strokes in the shape of a 
wedge, or rather arrowhead. Now Layard has figured, 
among other things found in Assyria, an altar on which 
reposes a gigantic arrowhead, half as large as the altar 
itself, — as large in proportion, in fact, as a sheep or a calf 
would be if laid upon the altar. Lying thus upon the 
altar, it must be considered as a sacred object, offered to 
some God. Or, if the altar be merely a pedestal, then the 
arrowhead must be regarded as a divinity. But the arrow- 
head is just the shape of the Cadmean letter A ; is Alpine 
in the Arkite sense ; was used in divination ; carried the 
great hyperborean Druid Abaris, in Greek fable, on its 
back to Delphi; and was as appropriate an offering as the 
fir-cone, or as the little pyramid held in the open palm of 
the Egyptian priest. What connection may hereafter be 
traced between this worship of the arrowhead in Mesopo- 
tamia and the use of flint weapons by the people of Central 
Asia, in the Stone age, I will not venture to conjecture. 
It is enough for my present purpose that the construction 
of the Assyrian letters out of arrowhead- shaped strokes, 



240 THE GROWTH OF [LECT. 

gave them a peculiar sanctity or significance in an Arkite 
sense, and converted them all into Alpine hieroglyphics. 

Confining ourselves therefore still to this Alpine or 
pyramid symbol, let me ask you how an ancient scribe 
would be likely to make a letter out of it. Would it not 
be in one of these four ways? 1. If he worked in a 
Chinese spirit, scorning perspective, he would use four 
diverging strokes to express its four sloping angles. If 
he were a true artist he would use three diverging strokes, 
the middle one perhaps a little on one side for the sake 
of perspective. If he were a literal fellow he would use 
two strokes and be satisfied with that. But if he were a 
transcendentalist he would use but one vertical stroke to 
represent the essential idea of isolated height. 

Neglect the first form as too absurd for any body but a 
Chinaman, and the last also as too transcendental to have 
come into vogue until the refinements of later ages pro- 
duced the obelisk out of the pyramid, and the obeliskal let- 
ters^ out of the pyramidal, it remained for the common 
Alpine letter to be made of either two or three strokes, 
joined of course at the top. Look now at this series of 
ancient Cadmean letters, of which No. 1 is from a Greek 
boustrephedon inscription, the fourth is Phoenician, and 
the rest are antique Greek. 

AAAMflAfi*^ 

1234 5678 9 10 

You will perceive how the original form came to vary so 
much that there is in some cases now scarcely a recog- 
nizable trace of its original intention. Look, again, at the 
initial Sanscrit A, No. 11, of the following forms; and 

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 

when you remember that all Sanscrit letters are hung 
npon a sort of clothes-line and boxed up by vertical 
strokes, you can see how the essential three divergent 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 241 

lines of the pyramid may come to form tlie cuneiform 
letter, No. 12 ; and, finally, the Armenian letter, No. 13. 

But there are still simpler pyramidal forms for the 
letter. The Runic A has only two strokes, No. 14 ; and so 
had some of the Roman forms of the time of the Christian 
era, Nos. 15, 16, as well as the Moeso- Gothic, No. 18. 

But there is an Irish form of great antiquity, used ex- 
tensively in Europe, which has a peculiar significance, 
No. 18, formed of an horizontal stroke across the summit 
of two others. By reference to this upper stroke I think 
we reach a complete understanding of the Arkite ideas of 
the early alphabet -makers. But to make this clear I must 
speak of another element of alphabetic writing, the water- 
symbol. 



/VVW 




SMN 



19 20 21 22 23 24 



The Egyptian hieroglyph for water was three horizontal 
waved lines, often reduced to one. In process of time 
this became merely a straight horizontal line. Out of this 
Egyptian hieroglyph the Greeks made their sharp hissing 
cc (H, f), and the Assyrians their cuneiform S, No. 21. 
The early Greeks made these lines waving like the Egyp- 
tian, but the classic Greek alphabet converted the waved 
into straight lines. The Greeks and R,omans used the 
same Egyptian water-symbol for the simple sibilant s ; 
but they stood it up straight, No. 22 ; because water 
never hisses except when it rises in a jet or falls in a 
cataract. When they desired an alphabetic letter to ex- 
press the murmuring sound of water as upon the sea shore, 
they preserved the original horizontal posture of the sym- 
bol; and hence our MMs and Eli's. The most ancient 
Egyptians did not recognize in their alphabet the hissing 
sound of water : it would be difficult to say why, unless it 
might have arisen from the scarcity of rain and mountain- 
torrents, cascades and jets, in the valley of the Nile. It 
is a curious fact also that they employed their water-symbol 
for their letter N ; whereas for M they chose the figure of 
an owl. 

These two sounds of water are recognized more or less 

16 



242 THE GEOWTH OF [LECT. 

distinctly in all human languages. For instance, in our own 
English we have two names for the great and little waters 
of the earth : the former we call the Main, as the Hebrews 
called it Mini* The latter we call Seas. In eastern myth- 
ology the name of the hundred-headed sea-serpent on 
which Vishnu sits is in Sanscrit Shi-shi. The name of the 
Syrian Noah was Xisuihras. 

The soft hissing sound of Z in Italy had the same water 
form. The dental sibilant of the Greeks, 0, was originally 
represented by the Egyptian zig-zag waterline surrounded 
by a circle. It was reduced afterwards to a line, and 
finally to a point or dot. In Arkite symbolism this letter 
had a special function in signifying things surrounded by 
water. Thus holy Mount Athos received its name, A©, 
because, the A represented a mountain, and signified 
that it was surrounded by the sea. 

Let us return once more, carrying with us now this water- 
symbol, to the discussion of the letters that were founded 
on the mountain idea. The diluvial mountain could be re- 
presented in three ways: either in the air, or partially sub- 
merged, or wholly submerged ; in other words, the water- 
symbol line could be drawn across it at the bottom, in the 
middle, or at the top. The first would make the Greek 
letter delta, A, the simple mountain tol or toe, — our letter 
D. The second made the Greek letter alpha, A. The 
third gives us the Irish and Gothic letter a, Kb. 18 above. 
The Runic alphabet of northern Europe adds additional 
confirmation to these facts, by giving a pyramidal form 
to its letter t, the equivalent of the Greek d, and by calling 
it by the same name Tyr. 

Finally, to show the connection of the pyramid and 
obelisk in alphabetic forms, as in architecture, it is only 
needful to contrast the A and T (or D) in respect of this 
horizontal waterline, with all the other letters. These are 

26 27 28 29 30 31 

the only two letters, carrying the waterline, in the old 
cuneiform alphabet ; just as they stand apart from all the 
others in the Cadmean alphabets of the west, in carrying 




IX.] THE ALPHABET. 243 

it ; as may be seen in the following series. The dj, No. 27, 
and sh, 28, are no exceptions, for they are evidently 
subsequent modifications of the older simple d, No. 26. 
Nor is it less a significant fact that the only other letter 
besides a, made with three vertical strokes, is the letter th, 
No. 31. 

I could adduce still a number of other instances * of the 
essential similarity between these two letters. But I have 
already far transgressed the extent to which I had intended 
to carry the illustration of the subject. As I said at the 
outset, it is impossible to do more than to give you some 
idea of its richness; and to suggest a method of inves- 
tigation which will be likely to yield the best results. 

Each letter of the alphabet might be taken up in its 
turn, and its original mythological significance developed 
by comparison with other letters in the same alphabet, and 
other forms in other alphabets. For instance, the liquids 
L and R were used to represent the flowing of water, 
sliding and slipping actions, continuance, and all that class 
of ideas. Mythological explanations come in everywhere. 
Rhea, the goddess of the flood, from peiv, to flow, and 
geographical names like Rhine and Rhone, are good illus- 
trations. Invention, design, the regulated fancy of a learned 
caste, appear at every step. The natures of the letter- 
sounds were critically studied, and ingeniously applied, as 
in the Greek word aet, (always) constructed out of vowels, 
in a definite order, so as to express continued existence. 

In a word, words were designedly built up, by the old 
scribes, by placing the letter- symbols in all sorts of well- 
devised positions and • relations to each other, until the 
Arkite fancy was exhausted and satiated with its work 
or play; and then fresh crops of Arkisms took root in 
these strange compositions, and new series of fables sprang 
from them again to delight the taste and feed the venerat- 
ing instinct of other generations. 

But before bidding adieu to this whole subject, to pass to 
quite a different one in the next lecture, I must say a word 
respecting the history of the growth of the more ancient 
alphabets. 

The history which Chinese scholars give of the 
growth of their own language is precise and authentic, 

* See A. 2. 16. 



244 THE GEOWTH OF [LECT. 

although, their literature will not compare for antiquity 
with that of Egypt. The most ancient book they have, is 
supposed to have been written somewhat more than 1000 
years before Christ, that is, before the time of King David. 
It is called Y-King, or the book of transformations. In a 
supplement to it called Hi-thseii, edited by two learned 
Chinese of the 11th century before the Christian era,* we 
find this account of the origin of Chinese writing : c In old 
times Paoi or Foii-hi governed the world ; and lifting up his 
eyes, saw figures in the sky ; and casting down his eyes, 
saw models of them on the earth, in the forms of birds and 
beasts, and in the proportions of the earth. From these 
near and distant objects he began to trace out the eight 
symbols (koua), to penetrate the meaning of the divine 
intelligence, and to classify therein the properties of things 
by genera/ 

An ancient commentator upon this book explains that 
the fundamental distinctions involved in this classification 
were those of the fixed and the mobile, the resisting and the 
yielding; which correspond very well to the western 
mountain and water symbols. He adds that the generic 
figures were those of lakes and mountains, wind, thunder, 
&c. He then goes on farther to explain that Fo formed 
his letters by six rules. By the 1st he imitated the objects 
themselves ; by the 2nd he combined these imitations into 
groups ; by the 3rd he inverted their meanings ; by the 
4th he invented determinative marks to express accidents, 
c high and low/ for instance ; by the 5th he gave his letters 
metaphorical meanings ; by the 6th he showed by letters 
the sounds of things. Pauthier names these six classes of 
letters: 1. The Figurative; 2. The Qualitative; 3. The 
Composite; 4. The Polar or Antithetic; 5. The very 
numerous class in which an image of the object is given, 
and with it another character to express the sound of its 
name; 6. The Abstract or Figurative. He gives five or 
six characters as examples of each class, from which I 
select but one, to show the plan upon which it was con- 
structed, and the change its shape has undergone in course 
of time. 

* Wen-wang and Tcheon-Koung ; see Panthier's Essay, page 3, et 
seq. The commentator takes occasion to remark that before Eo's time 
men employed knotted cords in the administration of affairs. 



IX.] 



THE ALPHABET. 



245 



For example : — 



1st Class, 
Imitative. 



2nd Class, 
Qualitative. 



}£ 



the sun : now written 



morning 



3rd Class, 1 ^-n^Nvn / j \ 

Composite. J ©J (sun and moon) 



glit : now written 




4th Class, I 

Polar or !■ 

Antithetic. J 

5th Class, 

very numerous, 

Image and 

Sound 
combined. 

6th Class, 

Abstract, or 

Figurative. 






left 



right 




spirit, genius 
from on high : 



heart, 
i. e. soul : 



7 A^ 



ty 



In Fig. 9 above, No. 1 is the Sun, represented as on the 
Egyptian hieroglyphics, by a disc with a dot in it; 2. 
Morning, by a solar disc above a horizon line; 3. Light, 
by the two figures of the sun and moon combined; 4. 
Left and right, by two tridents with curved handles, pointed 
different ways ; 5. Spirit, or genius sent from above, by 
three slightly waved lines depending from a horizontal line, 
meaning the sky ; 6. Soul or affection, by a heart. Many 
other and finer examples might with a little care be 
selected. The best description I have seen of the figurative 
cunning of the inventors of the ancient Chinese characters 
is in H. Noel Humphrey s' History of Writing. Take,, for 
instance, the three signs following :— 



n 



folding doors; 



[^ listening; ^ 



asking a 
question. 



ear. 



mouth. 



246 THE GEOWTH OF [lECT. 

Or these : 

JP singing bird ; S£ sunshine ; xjk obscurity. 

bird. tree. 

The passage of the figurative into the phonetic is accom- 
plished under class V. by a union of the two ; thus, a 
duck is not only drawn, Fig 10, but has a character added 
to express the sound of its name Id. A willow is repre- 
sented by a tree and the phonetic K. A root is repre- 
sented by a tree, and a phonetic ~ken, &c. 

Tig. 10. 

^ <fc iRX 

Ki Ki Ken 

Rude as this method is, it was the one adopted also by 
the inventors of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. In fact, these 
phonetic adjuncts are little else than the matres lectionis of 
the Hebrew, in the essential genius of their purpose. 

There are some remarkable fables relating to this inven- 
tion of the great Cadmus of the East, which throws a new 
light upon its nature. In one passage it is said that Fo 
got the external forms of things from the heavens, but his 
letter-figures he saw ( upon the picture which issued before him 
from the waters.' And this mystic Arkite description of the 
nature of the origin of letters does not by any means stand 
alone. It is repeated by other writers, and in other forms, 
and has no doubt some deep significance. Men whose 
books are filled with practical wisdom, humour, and wit, 
shrewd sarcasm and a refined fancy, do not utter what 
seems the sheerest nonsense, the folly of babes, without a 
cause. 

Lopi, the author of the ancient 'book of itineraries/ 
writes, that Fohi called his new invention Dragon-writing, 
because he found it in marks upon the back of a Dragon- 
horse which rose out of the waves. For the same reason all 
the great mandarins or scribes in early days were denomin- 
ated dragons. It will occur to you at once that Cadmus, 
whom the Greeks considered the inventor of the alphabet, 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 247 

obtained his colonists by sowing the teeth of a dragon. 
The hydra, the many -headed dragon of Greek fable, as its 
name shows, represented the raging waves of the sea. The 
Chinese word Shan, a mountain, is expressed by a charac- 
ter which shows three teeth. The centaurs of Greece — 
half man, half horse — were the learned men of that heroic 
age, ' the priests of the mountain/ -^ jn^ ; and their 
chief initiated Hercules and Achilles into all the mysteries 
of learning which then were. 

Whatever maybe the date assigned to the origin of the 
alphabet, or what the country, the fable still wears this 
peculiar mountain-water, or Arkite, garb. One Chinese 
authority, Hoai-nan-tseu. (189 B.C.) asserts that Thsan-hie, 
crown lawyer to the Emperor Hoang-ti in 2698 B.C., was the 
inventor. Another fixes on a somewhat lower date, 2357 B.C. 
But here again the fable shows itself in a still more perfect 
form ; for the tortoise has always been the living and walk- 
ing symbol of the Tor, the Druid under his tumulus ; and 
therefore the Indian mythology piles the earth upon the 
elephant and the elephant upon the tortoise. The great 
sea-tortoise especially, seen with his back above the waves, 
struck the ancient Arkite imagination with transcendant 
admiration. So the story goes that the Emperor Yao, in the 
year 2357 B.C., began to trace letters in imitation of the cha- 
racters which he noticed on the bach of the divine tortoise, 
which was brought to him by a barbarian family from the 
far south. This tortoise was three feet wide, and a thousand 
years old ; and on its back was written, in Kho-teau cha- 
racters, the ivhole history of the world from its. beginning. 
The land of the south may have been India, or Mesopo- 
tamia, or Egypt, for all that we know to the contrary. A 
similar, but long subsequent, arrival of learned strangers, 
about 1110 b. c. (a date not very far from that of Solomon's 
commerce with Ophir, by the way,) is mentioned in the 
Li-tai-ki-sse.* 

After describing the dragon-scrip of the most ancient 
times, and the tortoise-shell alphabet of the 24th century 
before Christ, the Chinese historians go on to tell us that 
during the Han dynasty, i. e. from 2205 down to 1766 B.C., 
the people got used to writing a third, but also extremely 

* Pauthier, p. 10. 



248 THE GROWTH OF [lECT. 

ancient, kind of characters, such as are seen on bells, vases, 
and tripods preserved in the present museums and palaces 
of the celestial kingdom. 

When the Tcheoii dynasty came in, before the time of 
Solomon, 1134 B.C., its founder introduced 'a new modifi- 
cation of the alphabet, called the bird tracks, Niao. Soon 
afterwards, that is, under the Wen- Wang dynasty, 1110 
B.C., the fish-gambol characters, Nu, came into vogue, and 
every kind of polite learning got systematized. It was at 
this time that the sage Pao-chi invented the five rules 
of politeness, the six kinds of music, the five methods of 
archery, and the five styles of horsemanship ; and fixed for 
all succeeding times the six styles of writing, as now re- 
cognized by all Chinese scholars. 

In 221 B.C. Li-sse, at the emperor's command, invented 
the small tchouan writing ; but it was rejected except for the 
royal signets ; and then he invented the ta or great tcheuen 
writing, a most artificial and fantastical form of character, 
wholly different from those that had been in use, viz. under 
the Tcheou dynasty, 880 B.C., which scarcely differed from 
the Kou-wen, or ancient figurative forms, in which the six 
Kings, &c, of Khoung-tseu and the great Commentary of 
Tso-kieov-meng were all written. 

Then came the dissolution of the Empire, and the rise 
of the great heptarchy of independent provinces, which 
caused local modifications of the characters chiefly due to 
differences in artistic taste. One of these provinces, the 
easternmost, ruled over by a dynasty called Han, had 
wisdom enough to throw overboard the whole literature of 
the past, and attempt to open for the national mind a new 
career. 

Once, only this once, in the history of this strange na- 
tion, there seemed a chance of the establishment of that 
tremendous power in letters which changed the face of the 
intellectual world in the far west ; I mean a pure phonetic 
alphabet, such as gave Greece its empire over thought, 
and Home its empire over society, and 'Palestine its throne 
of grace and worship over Christendom. Even Egypt knew 
enough to adopt a demotic or current hand. The number 
of Chinese characters amounts to 80,000. The whole num- 
ber of Egyptian characters in Champollion's Dictionary is 
but 749. Those which modern science is content to use, 



IX.] 



THE ALPHABET. 



249 



even including all the mathematical, chemical, and- other 
signs, would not amount to many more than a hundred. 
What China would be now, had the invention of the bold and 
easy cursive hand-writing been adopted by thefian dynasty, 
in a.d. 76 to 88, no one may say. But the purely phonetic 
'bureau hand/ tfsao, as it was called, would probably have 
set the soul of China free from the incubus of its strange, 
fossilized, monosyllabic, uncompromising characters, which 
weighs the future down for ever under the load of all the 
past. But the experiment did not succeed. The emperor, 
Hiao-ho-ti, in a.d. 89, while John was writing his great 
Gospel, annulled the new invention on the ground that it 
disturbed the public education, and ordered a return to 
the culture of the ancient hand; on which his head gx^am- 
marian, Hiu-chin, immediately composed a treatise in 40 
books, which sealed the fate of China to the end of time. 
The Chinese characters now in use have certainly not 
varied in shape since the year 618 of the Christian era.* 

But to show how they have varied since the invention 
of letters by Eohi, I take from Pauthier the following 








%%7 

4, Vv X A A 



specimens of the three ancient styles, called : 1. the 
Komven, of the highest antiquity; 2. the Td-chouen, of 
mean antiquity; 3. the Siao-clwuen, of low antiquity; 
followed by, 4. the Li-chou, or bureau character; 5. the 
Hing-chou, common or current hand; 6. the Thsao-chou, 
cursive hand; 7. the Kiai-chou, square seal character; 
and, 8. the Kiai-hing-chou, or current hand, all of more 
modern age. Fig. 12 gives the original Komven characters 

* Pauthier, p. 21. 



250 THE GROWTH OF [LECT. 

for ' heaven/ c man/ and the ' savage beast sse/ followed 
by the modifications of form to which they were subjected,, 
corresponding to the other seven styles of writing, suc- 
cessively coining into vogue during the four thousand 
years which have elapsed since the reputed age of Fo. 

It is only by tracing the forms of the Chinese radicals 
back through their various transformations to their original, 
that any comparison with the Egyptian hieroglyphs can 
be made ; but when this is carefully done important analo- 
gies are discoverable. The classification of ideas common 
to both eras has been made upon a common principle, 
which was, in fact, to be expected from the very constitu- 
tion of the human mind. But in some instances forms 
are also common to the two systems, establishing some 
actual historical connection between' the two, such as is 
hinted at by the legends cited above. 




10 11 



jp&kk rib Ws&fc/t 

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 - ' 20 21 22 

Figure 13 gives the twenty-two* characters which the 
priests of Egypt invented for determining the class to 
which any particular hieroglyphic belonged, when its pro- 
nounced or written name would not of itself show. The 
modern alphabetic writing has done away with the neces- 
sity for such a rude device, but originally some such 

* Pauthier's Essai, p. 103. "[Thiemann gives thirteen, on the authority 
of Ideler, based on Champollion. Bunsen's list is more extensive. 



IX.] THE ALPHABET. 251 

method was indispensable. For instance, the difference 
between sheep and ship in English is made in writing by- 
using in one case two vowels e, and in the other one vowel 
i. But in the absence of vowels it would be necessary to 
add to the word shp some sign, in the one case a rude 
picture of a boat, and in the other case a rude sketch of an 
animal. This is precisely the mode in which the Egyptians 
used the following determinative signs, standing for — 1. all 
names of gods; 2. of goddesses; 3. of men; 4. women; 5. 
members of the body ; 6. quadrupeds ; 7. birds ; 8. rep- 
tiles ; 9. fish; 10. trees; 11. plants; 12. metals; 13. 
stones; 14. edifices or habitations; 15. places; 16. stars; 
17. divisions of time; 18. fluids; 19. things noxious or 
ecclesiastically impure or unclean, represented by a spar- 
row; 20. scripture; and 21. actions. 

Under these I have arranged a selection from the whole 
list of over 200 Chinese radicals, such as represent the same 
ideas, by equivalent denominative signs. These are named 
in Chinese : 1. Ky (Radicals, 113, 119, p. 489 of the Great 
French Dictionary); 2. My, p. 534; 3. Jin, 9, p. 8; 4. 
In, 38, p. 138; 5. Jo, 130, p. 587; 6. Meou, 93, p. 398; 
7. Mao, 196, p. 899; 8. Tchong, 142, p. 655; 9. Yu, 195, 
p. 891; 10. Mo, 75, p. 288; 11. Tsao, 140, p. 615; 12. 
Peh, 154, p. 724; 13. Chy, 112, p. 478; 14. Mien, 40, p. 
145, and Yen, 53, p. 177; 15. Kin, 167, p. 793, Y, 163, p. 
779, and Febu, 170, p. 818; 16. Chin, 161, p. 765; 17. 
Jy, 72, p. 274; 18. Ho, 86, p. 380; 19. Choiiy, 85, p. 343; 
20, 21. Til, 129, p. 586; 22. Hing, 144, p. 672. 

The principal alphabets to be studied are the Punic; 
the still but partially understood Italic or Etruscan group ; 
the Phoenician, Samaritan, Himyaritic, Arabic, Hebrew, 
Coptic, and Amharic; the Armenian; the three ex- 
tremely ancient cuneiform alphabets ; the Davanagari and 
other alphabets in India; the Thibetan; the Burmese, 
Siamese, and Singalese of farther India; the Japanese, 
and the Corean. They are all different at first sight from 
one another, and some are comparatively modern. But 
when critically studied they are all found to be allied more 
or less distantly. Of all these the Corean is the most per- 
fectly regular. 

Our own alphabet, derived from the ancient Cadmean, 



252 THE GROWTH OF THE ALPHABET. 

is theoretically reducible to four or five letters, represent- 
ing that many classes of sounds : 



'owels. 


Labials. 


Gutturals. 


Dentals, &c. 


A 


B 


c 




D 


E 


F 


G 




H 


I 


M 


K 




L 

N 





P 


Q 




EST 


U 


VW 




X 




Y 








Z 



A mere glance at this scheme will show that the letters 
of the alphabet were not placed fortuitously in their posi- 
tion ; that the vowels came in the order of their vocal de- 
velopment ) in a word, that the entire alphabet is a fivefold 
orderly repetition of the first four letters, ABCD, which in 
themselves sum up the entire range of sounds, and make 
the key notes to all the dialectic transmutations of letters 
to which I have already drawn attention more than once 
before. These transmutations occur regularly only within 
the respective columns of this scheme. For instance, B is 
exchanged for F, M, P, or Y, but never for C, G, K, Q, or 
X ; nor for D, H, N, H, S, T, or Z. In cases where a let- 
ter of one column seems to be transmuted into a letter of 
another column, as in the often-quoted instances of W illiam 
for Gulielmus, — German welch for old English quilk, — 
French garenne for English warren, &c.,a loss of some letter 
must always be supposed, or the substitution of one of the 
vowels for one of the letters. In the- three instances just 
quoted the initial g is lost : — thus g-william for g-ulielm, 
q- welch for q-uilk, g-warren for g-(b)arenne. 

It is true that in the fourth column are collected dentals, 
linguals, sibilants, a nasal and an aspirate, but all these 
are proved to be transmutable by the simple method of 
comparing a dozen or two of allied dialects. D and T are, 
in fact, the same letter; L and R are universally inter- 
changeable ; S and Z are identical ; N is the nasal of D, as 
M is of B ; and H is, in fact, a sibilant in its simplest form, 
as such words as aks and sel show. 

Here I must leave this fascinating subject, hardly having 
taken the first step across its threshold, but only thrown 
open the door to exhibit the immensity and magnificence 
of its interior. 



253 



LECTURE X. 

THE FOUR TYPES OE RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 

. If the views be correct which I have very imperfectly 
expressed in the previous lectures of this course, we are 
now prepared to enter upon the last and most important 
and most interesting subject connected with the early 
history of man — the origin of its mythologies. 

It will be necessary to keep always in view the funda- 
mental distinction between religion and worship. Religion 
is the soul of worship. Worship is the body, the phe- 
nomenal form of religion. The religious life of man con- 
sists of a combination of three of his elemental forces, — 
Admiration, Love, and Fear — having for their object of 
activity the invisible or superhuman world. 

As there are four great types of organic animal life, 
represented by the Articulate, Radiate, Mollusc, and Ver- 
tebrate kingdoms, — so there are four great types of this 
religious life, embodied in the Worship of the dead, the 
Worship of the powers of nature, the Worship of God in 
heaven, and the Worship of the universe. 

Under these four heads all human conceptions of the 
divine as worshipful can be collected. In one sense they 
are four successive stages in the order of the development 
of the human intelligence governing the exercise of the 
instinct of worship. They are not only philosophically 
consecutive in the order of nature, but to a certain extent 
also historically consecutive in the order of time. They 
have co-existed in some ages, and been combined and in- 
termixed in some countries; just as in the case of the four 
types of animal life. But they have virtually followed 
each other in ruling the world ; just as, in the succession 



254 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 

of geological ages, Radiates had their maximum develop- 
ment first, Molluscs next, and Vertebrates last of all. 

For it will not do to affirm — drawing sharp lines of 
distinction— that in the ages of man's first appearance 
on the planet there was no other worship than that of 
their dead parents, or of the manes of their heroes ; that 
everywhere there followed Fetichism, or the worship of 
the powers of nature ; that then in later times all nations 
attained to the higher worship of some Fate, or Jove, or 
God of Heaven ; and that finally, in these last times, a 
genuine Pantheism has grown universal. Far from it. 
Complex enough have been the combinations of religious 
ideas as far back in history as we can see. Varieties of 
the individual, co-working with varieties of race, and with 
the various stages and kinds of civilization, have kept, not 
only alive, but in full vigour, the worships of the past, side 
by side with one another, and with the higher worships of 
the present day, developing, in fact, their four great types 
in four parallel lines ; just as, in the growth of the whole 
animal kingdom, we notice that Radiates and Articulates 
lived together in the oldest sedimentary rocks, and are 
represented still in the multiform fauna of to-day ; while 
Molluscs and Vertebrates, from the time when these ap- 
peared, have been mixed in with them through all the 
higher and later sediments. 

All that we can affirm, therefore, is this ; — that the 
earliest times of mankind seemed to be stamped with the 
forms of ancestral worship chiefly, some of which have 
lasted to the present moment; — fetichism of all kinds — 
stone worships, mountain worships, water worships, fire, 
air, and sky worships, Sabasism, Mithraism, Indraism, 
and the astrological systems of the ancients, flourished 
chiefly in a second age, but have also lasted to our day ; 
— then the cultivation of the Taste by idolatry, and of the 
Sentiments by mysticism, produced at the beginnings of 
historic times, grand, dominating, ceremonial worships of 
a god supreme, Jove and Jehovahism, culminating in 
Christianity ; and that, finally, the culture of the Intellect 
has developed Pantheism. 

When circumstances favour their growth, all these types 
are developed in a single nation, in a single individual; 
but they come to consciousness in this one order only. 



X.] RELIGIOUS WOESHIP. 255 

Their consecutive development has been realized in all 
the cultivated portions of the great historic section of the 
race. Pantheism has expressed itself in the Hindu Yedas. 
and in the Christian writings ; by Plotinus the Pagan, and 
by Spinoza the Christian ; by Swedenborg in one charac- 
teristic form, and by Hegel in another. On the one hand, 
children and savages cannot be Pantheists. On the other 
hand, philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Blanco 
White, historians like Buckel, naturalists like Yon Baer, 
were equally impossible in the Stone period. There is a 
time for everything under the sun. Ages may overlap. 
One nation may outstrip another in its religious develop- 
ment. One race may hurry forward from Fetichism to 
Pantheism with greater intellectual vivacity than another ; 
but he who aspires to be the historian of mythologies must 
learn to recognize, or have the genius to construct, out of 
the apparent confusion which has thence ensued, some 
wide, consistent, ever-working law of growth, some com- 
prehensive system of religious development residing in the 
very nature of the common mind of man. 

If now there be four types of religion, there are also but 
four modes of worship. I use the word here in a more 
precise and restricted sense. The religious sentiments of 
man, intelligently directing themselves towards any one of 
the four great objects of adoration, embody themselves in 
four forms of worship. In other words, all the religions of 
the ages have become incarnate with four members : 
Prayer, Praise, Offering, and Sacrifice. They correspond to 
the instincts of religious Fear, religious Love, religious 
Policy, and religious Conscience, or the sense of justice. 
And they have filled the world, for ages upon ages, with 
cries, and songs, and gifts, and altar-smoke. 

As worship is a body for the spirit of religion, so cere- 
monial is the dress which these four kinds of worship 
wear. Ceremonials are merely special shapes and combin- 
ations of prayer, praise, offering, and sacrifice, devised by 
the clerical imagination, localized by circumstances, and 
sanctified by long tradition. 

In common parlance we speak of ceremonials as religions ; 
and we class men rudely by them. There could not be a 
more unphilosophical mistake. An ethnologist might as 
well attempt to classify the races of mankind by the 






256 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 

fashions of their clothes. No two kinds of ceremonial, for 
example, could be more unlike than that of the Romish 
Church on the one side, and that of the Quakers, Puritans, 
Methodists, or Moravians on the other. And yet if we ana- 
lyze the Papist and the Protestant with equal scrupulosity 
and skill, we shall obtain what chemists call i allotropic 
elements ' in both. What is Protestantism but melted 
sulphur dropped into cold water? or, if the. amour projore 
of my audience demand another simile, red phosphorus, 
innoxious to the manufacturers ? In the Romish commu- 
nion you have Calvinist and Arminian, Jansenist and 
Jesuit, Rationalist and Mystic, just the same and just as 
eager as in the Protestant communions. There is not a 
spiritual distinction with which intercourse and literature 
have made us familiar, that we cannot discover (of course, 
with intellectual modifications of expression, due to various 
culture,) in all the religions of the modern world. 

Nor is the rule confined to them. The same is true of 
the ancient mythologies. Under a ceremonial Joseph's 
coat of many colours, they present a grand simplicity 
of essential symbolism. But the fourfold distinction of 
religious type remains ; and combinations of the four modes 
of worship in each type are there. The mythologist must 
not allow himself to be cheated by the variety of cere- 
monial details. The confusion of priesthoods, and mysteries, 
and creeds, and fables, is only in appearance and in words, 
not in reality — only in the visible organizations and local 
establishments of the worshippers, not at all in the funda- 
mental ideas that inspired and regulated their worships. 
Let us look at these — 

I. The worship of the dead. 

I have said so much on this subject in previous lectures, 
that nothing remains but to place it in its true relationship 
of precedency to the other forms of religious thought and 
conduct. 

If it were necessary to add anything to the testimony 
which the Egyptian tombs of the first six dynasties afford 
to the extreme antiquity of ancestral worship among the 
more civilized nations at the dawn of history, we would 
find such additions in the mention of it in the hymns of 
the Rig Veda, the oldest literature of southern Asia. The 
laws of Menu speak of it as the most ancient religion of 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 257 

mankind. Long after Brahmanism had substituted' for the 
idea of immortality the doctrine of Metempsychosis, the 
custom of the sraddha, or funereal repast, continued to 
be kept ; rice, milk, roots, fruit, were furnished regularly 
to the departed soul. The Greeks and Romans, and in 
fact all branches of the Aryan race, sacrificed periodically 
at the tomb. 

So universal were these rites, that De Coulanges thinks 
himself justified in basing upon them his theory of the 
Family Law of the ancients. The stranger was excluded. 
The dead accepted service and homage only from his chil- 
dren and descendants in direct succession. ( The dead/ 
says Lucian, ( who has left no son, receives no offerings, 
and is exposed to a perpetual famine.'' So long as the 
family supplied their head with what he needed in the 
other world, so long he was its god and benefactor. The 
living needed the dead, the dead the living, equally. This 
mutual tie produced the solidarity of the family, the clan, 
the tribe. 

But from this service women were excluded. The 
hearth became an altar; the son became a priest. The 
daughter was always a servant — first to her father, then to 
her brother, then to her husband; once married, she 
passed into another family ; marriage was a second birth— 
the wife was the daughter of her husband. If the dead 
had only daughters he lost his immortality, became a 
larva, or returned to earth in another body to obtain 
another family. ' The extinction of a family/ says the 
Baghavatgita, ' causes the ruin of the religion of that 
family.'' ' No man/ says a Greek writer, f knowing that he 
must die, can care so little for himself as to be willing to 
leave his family without descendants, for then no one can 
worship him.'' f If a man die without sons/ says the 
Mosaic law, { let his brother marry his widow, and procure 
him children.' ( By children/ says the law of Menu, ( a 
man acquits his debt towards his ancestors, and secures his 
own immortality.'' The Hindu, who had no son, married 
off his daughter on the condition, that her first son should 
be considered as his own. 

This was the origin of the custom of adoption at a later 
period. The hereditary rights of property were first estab- 
lished entirely in the interest of this overwhelming re- 

17 



258 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 

ligious consideration ; property could protect the hearth, 
the tomb, the funeral rites,, the immortality. f Religion 
prescribes/ says Cicero, c that the possessions and the 
worship of each family should be inseparable, and that the 
care of the sacrifices should always devolve upon him to 
whom the inheritance belongs/ The right of primogeni- 
ture in England is maintained by precisely analogous con- 
siderations. The Roman daughter could inherit nothing 
from her father. The Greek laws forbade the daughter to 
inherit anything. The common law derived from Rome 
considers the daughter always as a minor. 

The adoption of a son, also, by another man than his 
father, removed him entirely from his own family, and 
passed him irrecoverably over to another, as in the case of a 
married daughter. When the demagogue Claudius curried 
favour with the populace by causing himself to be adopted 
by a plebeian, Cicero thundered at him the tremendous 
rebuke, ( Why dost thou expose, by thine own fault, the 
religion of the Claudian clan (gens) to become extinct ! 
Athens was but a confederation of families ; a number of 
families formed a (pparpia, a number of phratriae a tribe, and 
the tribes combined composed the city. The religion 
of the family retained its integrity long after the religion 
of the city was formulated in a more splendid shape. The 
fathers of the families became the dii Gentiles ; the city had 
its eponym deities. 

So much for the classic literature of the subject. Let us 
turn back now to far more ancient days, beyond the dawn 
of written history. Let us study ancestral worship in its 
first beginnings, preceding all those notions of religious 
sentiment and worship with which the monuments of the 
great past have made us so familiar. 

That it did actually precede all other kinds of religion 
seems indubitably settled by the archaeological discoveries 
of the last few years. If the picture of the head of an 
elephant slightly engraved upon a blade of ivory, broken 
into five pieces, discovered by Dr Falconer, in company 
with MM. Lartet and de Verneuil, when they visited 
together the excavations making at the station of La 
Madeleine, Commune of Turzac, in the valley of the Yezere, 
at the foot of the chalk cliffs of Perigord, in 1864, proves 
that the aborigines of that part of France were acquainted 



X.] EELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 259 

with the animal in its living state, although no elephants 
now live in Europe ; — if the bunch of lines descending 
beneath the throat be sufficient evidence that this elephant 
which lived among them was no other than the long- 
haired Mammoth, now entirely extinct, the carcases of 
which, however, are still preserved in the eternal ice banks 
of the Siberian coast, enveloped in the shaggy mantles 
characteristic of the species ; * — if another engraving of 
the head of a true elephant (that is, with almost vertical cra- 
nium), done upon a fragment of reindeer bone, found by M. 
de Vibraye at Langerie-Basse, a station lower down the 
valley, proves, in like manner, that the elephant, as well as 
the Mammoth, lived in France at that remote epoch, spe- 
cifically differing by its narrow oblong ears set forward 
close to the eyef from both the elephant of Africa and the 
elephant of Asia as we know them now ; — if the picture of 
a combat of reindeers (in which the attitude of the con- 
queror is described as of surprising truth) upon a plate of 
shist, with representations of a stag and doe, a horse, an 
ox, an otter, and a beaver, upon other materials, all found 
together by M. de Vibraye, in the diggings at Dordogne 
and Charente,J give us all the proof we should require 

* This peculiarity was verified by Mr Adams, in 1799, at the mouth of 
the River Lina, Troyon, p. 74. Comptes rendus de PAcademie des 
Sciences, lxi. p. 311. 

f Comptes rendus l'Acad. des Sciences, lxi , 21 Aout, 1865. The eye 
itself is represented closed by a finely-cut oblique line in its normal po- 
sition. The tusks are represented, and the trunk, rather thin, has a 
length about one and a half that of the head. Were these figures made 
under the influence of a traditional knowledge of the existence of the 
animals in a distant part of the world, chimerical characteristics would be 
apparent, whereas a scrupulous exactness of details has been observed, 
only to be accounted for on the supposition that the model was before 
the artist's eyes. And, of course, all doubt is set aside by the fact of the 
existence of the bones of these animals found in great numbers. Troyon, 
p. 75. 

% Mortillet, Materiaux, l^ re Annee, p. 109. Troyon l'homme fossile, 
p. 73. I have myself examined a large number of these relics (in 
cast) in the cabinet of my friend Professor Desor, and can vouch for the 
sober truthfulness of the following description of them by Dr Broca ; — 
'One can hardly conceive of men, deprived of the use of metal, able to 
fabricate in bone, in ivory, in horn, an infinite variety of tools, extremely 
delicate ; to chisel them into elegant forms, and represent by designs 
graven on the handles of their instruments, figures of various animals ; 
figures which are distinguished by an exactitude and artistic ability truly 
remarkable. To find, in equal measure, the art sentiment we must 



260 



THE FOUR TYPES OF 



[lect. 



Fig. 14. Handle of a Dagger, made of reindeer horn, and representing a 
Falling Deer, found at Langerie Basse, Dordogne, France, 1883. 




X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 261 

(apart from the evidence afforded by the bones' of the 
animals themselves fossilized in the same localities) that 
they were the contemporaries, the prey, and no doubt 
the dread of the men who sketched their forms ;-— if, in a 
word, such relics of rude skill serve well instead of books 
to inform us under what conditions the early races of man- 
kind protracted their material existence, why should we 
not expect to get equally significant hints respecting their 
intellectual and spiritual state ? 

The question is answered for us by the funerary grotto of 
Aurignac, in the south of France. 

A workman making a terrace for a vineyard, in 1852, 
dug into a talus of loose earth piled against the foot of a 
limestone bluff, and exposed to day a large stone slab set 
upright against a small arched opening, penetrating but a 
short distance into the rock. Seventeen human skeletons, 
some mammalian teeth, and eighteen little discs of sea- 
shell, pierced as if for wearing round the neck, were super- 
posed upon each other, in the little cave. The mayor of 
the canton was a good Christian but a bad ethnologist ; 
and so he gave orders to have the skeletons buried de- 
cently, before any one had a chance to examine them 
anatomically. Philanthropic, but rather stupid that ; con- 
sidering that these were the immortal relics of the Adams 
and Eves of Languedoc : and it was a chance, perhaps 
never to turn up again, for seeing if the story of an Eden 
could be proved or no. The adventure created no great 
excitement, and even the new burying-place of these ante- 
diluvian remains was afterwards forgotten. 

descend innumerable centuries to the best days of Greece. They form a 
contrast with the gross tracery of Celtic monuments so absolute that, 
perhaps, — it has been suggested — they have been the handiwork of 
modern refugees in the caves of the old troglodytes. But who in Europe, 
since Quaternary times, could design on reindeer bone or horn, the figure 
of an elephant different from all the kinds now living ? This interesting 
race led a peaceable existence. A cranium found in the grotto of Bru- 
niquel is distinguished by purity of form, softness of contours, slight pro- 
jection of its apophyses, and shallowness of muscular impressions, — 
features incompatible with the violent manners of a savage race.' In order 
to assure the reader that there can be no exaggeration in the eulogies be- 
stowed upon these wonderful works of art, 1 have drawn the figure of a 
falling reindeer, which serves for the handle of a horn dagger, and he may 
judge for himself of the artistic genius which these inhabitants of Gaul, of 
the reindeer age, displayed. See fig. 14, 



262 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 

In 1860 M. Lartet, unable to recover the bodies, com- 
menced his researches of the cave itself. After the stuff 
from the cliffs, which had concealed the mouth of the 
cave, had been removed, there remained a terrace standing 
about forty feet above the bed of the valley, and level with 
the floor of the grotto. The soil of this terrace, and the 
earthy floor of the grotto, formed one continuous deposit, 
of variable thickness, but everywhere yielding relics of an 
ancient age, — hearthstones, charred wood, and beds of 
cinders, pottery, flint tools and arrow-heads, and burned 
and fractured bones of animals. But mark this difference ! 
All the traces of fire, all the marks of good- table fellow- 
ship, all the proofs of industry, were outside, not inside, 
the grotto — in the soil of the terrace, not in the floor-earth 
of the cave. On the other hand, the human skeletons, 
the disjointed necklaces, were found within the grotto, 
and nothing of that sort occurred outside of it. 

No stalactites were visible in this cave, nor the usual 
stalagmite covering to the floor; no traces of the usual 
bone-mud brought by water, and enveloping the remains, 
as in other ossuary caverns. The earthy deposit seemed 
a bed spread by the hands of man, on which to lay the 
bodies found upon it. It was, to all intents and purposes, 
a cave of Machpelah, an aboriginal mausoleum. 

Outside the cave the friends of the departed had held 
their funereal feasts ; but what were ^their delicacies ? 
Animals no longer in existence, — the great cave-bear, the 
mammoth, the rhinoceros, the great horned Irish elk, and 
the cave-lion, attesting the immense antiquity of the event. 
The aurochs — now almost extinct — and the reindeer were 
also there. To these were added entremets of smaller crea- 
tures which have escaped extinction and continue to haunt 
our modern woods and fields : the common bear, the 
badger, polecat, wild-cat, wolf and fox, the horse and ass (?), 
the wild boar, common stag, and roe buck.* All the 
bones which contained marrow were found broken or split 
lengthwise with a knife. Hyenas' bones were also found; 
and these foul creatures must have stolen in by night to 
gnaw the relics of the feast, for the transverse marks left 
by their teeth occurred on many of the surfaces, and their 
dung was on the spot. , 

* One bone of a hare was also found. 



X] . RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 263 

Inside the cave were also found portions of animal 
skeletons, so articulated that it was evident the flesh had 
been upon them when they were deposited. Outside, the 
remains of ruminants predominated, especially of reindeer 
and of aurochs. Inside, those of carnivorous beasts pre- 
dominated, especially the fox. Some species were only 
represented by their teeth. 

A few more details, and we will be prepared to draw 
conclusions. 

A hundred lamellse of flint, some flakes or chips of flint, 
a kind of hammer, and some nuclei or matrix-blocks, gave 
positive indications that the manufacture of tools and 
weapons was carried on upon the spot ; and, therefore, 
that the visit of man to the grotto was not a single and 
incidental event. The bones and horns of the reindeer 
had been utilized for divers instruments, such as awls or 
bodkins, plain (unbarbed) arrow-heads, and whetstones in 
the shape of polished blades. 

The earthy deposit inside the grotto contained, with the 
human skeletons, teeth of the cave-lion and wild boar, and 
bones of the cave-bear, wolf, fox, horse, aurochs, reindeer, 
and other mammifers, neither broken, gnawed, nor burned. 

The picture of a bird's head was sculptured on the eye- 
tooth of a bear. A lamella of flint, perfectly fresh and 
unused, lay near it. The earth that had been thrown out 
of the grotto in a heap upon the terrace, at the time 
when the bodies were discovered, was carefully searched, 
and furnished a beautiful specimen of worked reindeer- 
horn, and about a hundred worked flints ; many of them, 
however, so exceedingly minute that it seems impossible 
to imagine them of any practical utility to those who made 
them and placed them with the dead. These were pro- 
bably miniature weapons, such as those small bronze 
swords and spears, an inch or two in length, which are 
often found in the cinerary urns of the north and south 
of Europe. (See Appendix to pages 309, 310. 

In the same heap of dirt coming from the grotto, 
were found, naturally enough, other human bones and bones 
of animals, none of which were either gnawed or broken ; 
and several fragments of pottery, more or less rudely 
made with the hand ; the only instance on record yet, 
in which this art has shown itself to be of an antiquity 



264 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 

commensurate with that of the extinct cave-bear. In all 
other cases where remains of pottery have been dis- 
covered, it has been in ossnary cave-deposits of the latest 
Stone age, i.'e. (see page 66) contemporary with the Bos 
primigenius (Urus), long after the total extinction of the 
great cave-bear and large pachyderms, and the retire- 
ment of the reindeer to the polar regions. We must 
keep in mind, however, here that these other ossuary 
deposits were not composed, as in this case, of dry earth, 
shovelled by man's hand ; but muddy loams, distributed 
by water ; and that in such aqueous deposits unhurried clay 
potsherds could have stood but little chance of preserva- 
tion. 

What now are our conclusions ? We have here before 
us a terrace and a cave, divided by a door of stone. On 
the terrace traces of active life, a workshop and a table, 
so to speak. In the cave no trace of life, dead bodies 
only, carefully shut in from the assaults of weather and 
wild beasts. The dead were buried then, not burned. 
But more, — arms, ornaments, food, vessels, holding per- 
fumes perhaps, or fruits, or cakes, were buried then (as in 
so many parts of the world is still the custom to this day) 
together with the dead. 

Those savages believed in immortality ! WTiat was the 
age they lived in ? The most remote of which we have, 
as yet, any certain information of the existence of mankind, 
— unless the reported discoveries of human fossils in the 
tertiary rocks be true — the first of the four established 
epochs of the great Stone age, the epoch of the cave- 
bear, the antique elephant and first rhinoceros; for the 
bones of this gigantic kind of bear were found not only 
upon the terrace but inside the cave. 

These funereal fires, these offerings in the tomb, this 
workshop of the travelling equipages of their dead before 
its door, are so many speaking traditions of an ancient, a 
most ancient, a first and altogether aboriginal worship of 
the manes of the dead. 

The strangest part of this strange story is, that when 
we turn to look at other funerary grottoes, for there are 
others, caves formed by nature and used for tombs by man, 
we see, first, that they are of a much later age, viz. the 
fourth epoch of the age of Stone ; that characterized by the 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 265 

predominance of the urus bones and domesticated animals ; 
and secondly, we notice in them no traces of funereal 
repasts ; at least none such have been reported or de- 
scribed* 

Was the worship of the dead abandoned, or forgotten, 
or exchanged for some newer form of religious ceremony 
during this interval ? That is hardly a possible suppo- 
sition ; for, as I have shown in previous lectures, Egyptian 
history opens under the auspices of this religious venera- 
tion for the dead ; and the Druid dolmens, cromlechs, and 
other structures, now considered as belonging to the lacus- 
trine or fourth epoch of the age of Stone, are all of them 
closely related to views and ceremonies which have the 
same religion for a starting-point. The cave of Aurignac 
stands as a fact so much alone in our present knowledge 
of those distant ages that it would be extremely hazard- 
ous to build any theory upon it involving comparative 
questions. It is very curious, however, to observe how 
the early sculpture also seems to have disappeared ; for on 
the Druid monuments, and even on the bronze utensils 
and armour of more civilized, times— those of the lacustrine 
epoch — we find no pictures of animated nature ; only 
circular and cross-bar patterns of a mathematical character, 
or fanciful arabesque designs. If Troyon be correct in 
ascribing this remarkable abstention to religious prejudices, 
such as those which Moses afterwards established among 
the Jews, and Mahomet among his followers, — then he 
may be equally correct in assigning to the deluge a date 
falling between the third and fourth epochs of the age of 
Stone : that is, following the disappearance of the reindeer 
and previous to the appearance of the present races of 
domesticated animals and plants on European soil, — to a 
deluge which was connected with slow changes of sea- 
level, and the melting of continental glaciers ; to a deluge 
which destroyed, not all indeed, but a large part of the 
previous population, and allowed of a fresh importation 
from the Orient, bringing with them an advance in arts 
and arms, domesticated animals, the serial grains and 

* Since this was written, Mr Dupont lias found a somewhat similar in- 
stance in Belgium, a description of which will be given in the Appendix 
to this volume. 



266 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 

orchard trees ; and together with this new social life, a 
more complicated set of religious ideas, among which the 
pure and simple earlier worship of the dead would occupy 
a subordinate and, perhaps, an insignificant position. 

But it is in vain for us to attempt, in this advanced age, 
either a defence or a precise definition of the extravagant 
story of the deluge transmitted to. us by the Hebrew 
scriptures. M. Troyon^s strong religious convictions 
have prevented him from saying in so many words 
that the deluge, which he proposes to place between 
the third and fourth Stone age, was an almost insensible 
variation of the sea-level, due to the retreat of the glacial 
fields ; but he leaves that inference to be drawn by his 
readers. Such, however, would be no Noachian deluge. 
It would be quite another thing to ascribe the introduction 
of new ideas simply to an amelioration of the post-glacial 
climates and soils of Europe, permitting an influx of an 
advancing population, among whom the primitive simplicity 
of ancestral worship had become confused and concealed 
by all those intellectual speculations and social customs 
which Professor Fustel de Coulanges, of Strasbourg, has 
traced backward in the pages of his admirable book, ( La 
Cite Antique. 3 * 

Whether this new population came from Asia originally, 
as the comparative philologists seem to agree in believing, 
or whether it was only reflected from the coasts of Asia 
Minor and Syria, like a wave, originating in the west or 
south, a view defended by Brugsch, in his discussion of 
the seat of the Tahmu race, and others affiliated with it, 
in the times of Ramses II., 1400 B.c.f ; or lastly, whether 
it came direct from the great centre of Berber or Numidian 
life, by Malta, Sicily, and Spain, as Desor and other ex- 
plorers of the Dolmen monuments seem inclined to 
favour, — in any case, such a population, endowed with 
Philistine (Phoenician or Pelasgic) arts and arms, would 
feel themselves no more embarrassed by the aborigines 
whom they found in situ, than the Quakers, Puritans, 
Cavaliers, and Catholics of the British colonies were by 

* Paris, 1864. Reviewed in the Bib. Univ., Lausanne, xxx. No. 
118. 
f Geographie der Nachbarlander iEgyptens. 4to. Leipsic, 1858. 



X.] RELIGIOUS WOESHIP. 267 

the red Indians. The one race wonld disappear slowly 
before the other without a deluge,, or be absorbed into it. 

But the subject of the apparent disappearance of these 
mortuary rites from western Europe becomes more highly 
complicated when we add to it the equally mysterious dis- 
appearance of all subsequent traces of that early art, which 
has so astonished antiquaries recently, by the admirable 
productions which it left entombed in the caves of Peri- 
gord. ( What/ asks Dr Broca,* ( has become of this in- 
digenous civilization, so original, so different from all we 
know ? Did it disappear by slow modifications ? No ; it 
vanished suddenly, leaving no trace behind, and, everything 
permits us to believe, by force. Following it without transi- 
tion, we can discover nothing but the imprints of a powerful, 
religious, warlike race, equipped with a perfected armour, 
and knowing how to polish silex, but otherwise not dis- 
posed to industry, and total strangers to all art sentiment. 
Sufficient indication of a brutal and conquering invasion ! 
The cave-dwellers of the age of Stone, who had acquired 
the mastery of the soil, and had succeeded in extirpating 
the last of the great mammifers of the Quaternary fauna, 
did not know enough to defend themselves against the 
irruption of barbarians ; and so we see a sort of pre-historic 
Middle Ages intervene, succeeding to beautiful days of a 
more ancient premature civilization, the origin of which is, 
as yet, entirely unknown/ But probably these people of 
the reindeer sculpture, so advanced in some respects, were 
merely the somewhat softened and polished offspring of 
the ruder savages of the epoch of the old diluvium. In 
more than one cavern, the lower layers of the soil contain 
rhinoceros and mammoth, while the upper hold only rein- 
deer bones. The flints of the second epoch were worked 
by simple percussion, precisely like those of the first epoch, 
only that the flakes were smaller, and therefore the work 
finer. No rubbing was employed in either. The knives 
of both epochs are precisely alike. We may then conclude 
from the sculptures of the reindeer cave-men of Perigord, 
that the still more ancient cave-bear people of the grotto of 
Aurignac had begun to make designs. One such, in fact, 

* Address before the Anthropological Society, Hist, des Travaux de 



268 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 

has been discovered by M. Garrigou, in another Pyrenean 
cave, — a pebble, on which are cut the outlines of a bear.* 

It would seem, in fact, impossible for a race, however 
low in mental capacity, to continue for many generations 
pecking away at flint nodules to make weapons, and at 
marrow-bones to obtain food, without developing ideas of 
form and the desire of producing them at will. Just so 
the ceremonial rites of interment must have grown up 
slowly from the most imperfect and accidental beginnings ; 
and any ideas of a hereafter must have been educed by 
chance from the accidents of life, through the religious 
faculty; just as accidental likenesses in stones and bones, 
and chance marks which were made on them by human 
teeth and flint knives, must have provoked the artistic 
faculty to rouse itself to attempt aesthetic shapes. 

All this was consistent with the lowest grades of 
savagery. I have said, in a former lecture, f that all 
evidence is against the cannibalism of the Scandinavian 
aborigines. But in other regions cannibalism may have 
prevailed. The subject has become lately a favourite and 
fruitful theme of discussion ; and the evidence against the 
aborigines is growing formidable. At the recent festival at 
Salisbury, in honour of the opening of the new Museum j 
of archaeological relics, Dr Thurnam read a paper on the 
round-head people of the round barrows (corresponding to 
the hugelgraber of Germany), and the long-headed people 
of the long barrows (reihen graber) . He asserted the priority 
of the latter, and their evident addiction to human sacri- 
fices. Mr Stevens stated that the human bones found in 
the pit-dwellings lately opened at Fullerton, were all split 
and broken like those of the animals with which they were 
found. In the Belgian caves the same fact has been re- 
marked. M. Garrigou (and M. Roujou also) has exhibited 
human bones from the Pyrenean caves, on which exist 
marks of methodical percussion, intended for opening the 
medullary canal. Dr Clement, of St Aubin, in Canton 
Neuchatel, has found the arm-bone of a boy, with numer- 
ous pointed teeth-marks on its sides and ends. 

War is the normal social state of all savages ; war with 

* ' Which, by the length of its cervical spiny apothyses resembles more 
the cave-bear than any other known species.' 
t Pages 130, 131. 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 269 

the beasts, war with encroaching clans. Their style of 
war was to be crafty, treacherous, and consequently cruel. 
The growth of religious ideas once introducing sacrifices, 
war offers human victims, and hunger baits the temptation 
sooner or later, which when yielded to becomes a habit ; 
and habits are hereditary. The traces of this custom 
are visible in the most civilized nations of antiquity. 
In Rome and Greece locks of human hair were laid upon 
the altar. Human effigies, built up of rushes, were on 
certain occasions, solemnly thrown into the Tiber. Mr 
Blyth thinks that the same explanation will suit for the 
red powder which the Hindoos throw about upon each 
other in their religious festivals. 

But whether flowers, or food, or incense, or ornaments 
and arms, or horses and slaves, or hecatombs of captured 
enemies, were offered in the sacrifices of the advancing 
ages, — all these rites, however beautiful some, however 
horrible others, were but the many-sided aspects of one 
aboriginal idea, the primitive religion of mankind, the 
pure and simple worship of the dead. 

I have said the pure and simple worship of the dead. 
What, then, was the aboriginal savage's idea of immortality ? 
A life beyond the grave ; no more, no less. How, then, 
did it differ from the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman ideas of 
the state of the departed ; and from that faith which the 
Christian casts, as his anchor, into Heaven ? 

All things are valued by relationships. A life this side 
the grave cannot be the same for any two living beings ; 
how can the life yon side be other than most manifold ? 
And its idea, if not mere book-lore, must be likewise mani- 
fold. The Egyptian's eternal mansion was a combination 
of Palace hall and Parisian restaurant. The Greek of 
Homer's day anticipated an Elysium such as Ossian sang. 
The artists and philosophers of the Empire half believed 
in a Hades of pensive, ennuied, gentle, garrulous, and re- 
gretful shadows, such as Dante has described, and Bocca- 
cio's ( Decameron' embodies in more earthly substantiality. 
The savage knew nothing of life but its wants and woes, 
its haggard forests, death chills, demon-like wild beasts, 
famines, incurable diseases ; what could his faith in im- 
mortality do for his hooped and shackled nature ? His 






270 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 

worship of the dead was but the germ of a religion, a mere 
instinct of his animal affections, — nothing more. 

The heaven of the Christian is a blinding reflection 
from the skies, of all the beauties and sublimities that the 
eye of the poet has seen upon the earth ; of all the sweet- 
ness of this life that the heart of parent and lover has ever 
tasted; of all those sun-lit regions of science which the 
latest civilizations have conquered and possessed. The 
immortality of the ancients was the immortality of the 
dead, with their faces always turned regretfully towards 
the life that they had lost, because it was real life ; while 
their immortality was but an eternal death, without an 
object and without activity. Jesus came and stood, and 
said, ' God is not the God of the dead, but of the living; \ 
therefore we say of Him that f He brought a living immor- 
tality to light/ 

Yet after all, the Christian religion is but the ancient 
worship of the dead, sublimated, glorified, intensified, 
made more concrete in its objects and details, and con- 
centrated upon one figure, around which all its ceremonial 
is grouped. 

II. The second type of religion is that of the worship of 
the powers of nature. Fetichism is its lowest form; 
astrology and fire-worship its highest forms ; but in every 
aspect its essential nature consists in the worship of the 
material parts of the world, under the false impression 
that they possess powers which they do not. This ought 
to be distinctly understood. There is a true and reason- 
able worship of the powers of nature, which regards their 
just sublimities, loves and respects their concurrent har- 
monies, burns with a grateful sense of their blessed in- 
fluences on the life of man, and shudders at the imagination 
of disasters, which the understanding can explain, and even 
sometimes can predict, but not prevent, nor even yet, per- 
haps, escape from. 

But a Fetich is a natural object superstition sly beloved 
or feared, because supposed to possess unknown, peculiar, 
or magical powers. A fetich is a thing personified by 
ignorant people, so as to be considered able to ad — 1. volun- 
tarily ; 2. under the influence of a kind or unkind feeling 
towards man ; and 3. with some other kind of power than 
its nature would suggest. 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 271 

The earliest Fetiches, no doubt, were stones and sticks. 

A stone, for instance, has the power to lie still where it 
is put, but not to get up of itself; it can roll down-hill, 
but not up-hill. Imagine our horror at seeing a rock slowly 
and deliberately rolling itself to the top of a hill ! or an 
Alpine aiguille nodding to us, and standing again erect ! 
Yet that is the horror of the fetich. One of the most 
effective scenes in the spurious continuation of Bunyan's 
Pilgrim's Progress, is that where the wretched man is 
hurried off by demons towards the mouth of the pit, while 
all the trees along the road-side draw back their branches 
from his despairing grasp, except two twigs, which merci- 
fully advance themselves, and by which he holds on and is 
saved. Amadis de Gaul and all the romance literature of 
the days of chivalry abounds in this conception, by the 
imagination, of a voluntary, kind or malignant, power, 
resident in things. It is the characteristic of our dream 
life ; it makes nightmare nightmare. It characterizes all 
child life. It makes itself dominant, not only over the 
savage population of the globe, but over the most culti- 
vated minds, at special times, and in respect to special 
things. I have known a well-balanced mind, set free from 
all superstitions but one, ascribe a prophetic power of mis- 
chief to broken glass. I have heard the most enlightened 
and liberalized people confess to a superstitious faith in 
those charming fetiches, the precious gems; and in- 
numerable are the beautiful legends on record respecting 
their magical powers. I have myself worn for four years 
an amulet, which no money would buy ; and since I have 
worn it, my life has been most prosperous. I will show it 
to you — it is the nail on which John Brown hung up his 
coat and hat all the time he was incarcerated in Charles- 
town jail. A friend of mine, a brigade surgeon in General 
Patterson's army, the first man who entered the cell, when 
our troops occupied the place (in 1861), looking round the 
room, saw nothing he could bring away for me, but this 
one nail, which the jailor told him had been thus used, — I 
hope it is my only fetich. 

What married woman in this audience of Boston Illumi- 
nataB would not feel heart-sick with a nameless premoni- 
tion of impending evil, if her wedding-ring should snap 
asunder ? That is her fetich. When the sword fell from 



272 THE FOUE TYPES OF [LECT. 

the castle-wall, tlie senesclial never thought of ascribing it 
to the fatigue of leather ; but to a voluntary ability in the 
sword itself to sound an alarm of danger to the noble 
house, of whose possessions it had been both grantor and 
guarantee. 

It is impossible to enumerate the instances of existing 
fetich worship in the uncultivated world. The worship of 
the horse-shoe is still almost universal ; I may explain its 
origin hereafter. So is the observance of the divining 
rod ; which has a similar origin. Of ten or twelve thou- 
sand wells bored during the last eight years in the Yenango 
county oil -region in Pennsylvania, a thousand (more or 
less) were located by diviners with a divining rod; or 
with a pendulum made of a deerskin bag enclosing a ball 
of musk ; or by spiritualists falling into trances and exe- 
cuting spasmodic evolutions when they felt the influence 
of the spot to be selected. There is a popular lecturer 
on geology, whose wife practises the profession of a 
spiritual explorer, by help of this kind of fetich. The 
other day she held a piece of antimony ore to her forehead, 
and immediately fell into a rhapsodical description of a 
charming lake-country, in Canada, through which the 
vein of that ore runs. I have seen shafts sunk after silver 
in the glades of Somerset county, Pennsylvania, under the 
dictation of an old scamp, who would lay in his hunting 
cap a small looking-glass, which had cabalistic characters 
on the back of it, and was called an erdspiegel ; and then 
hiding his own face over it, he would describe the depth 
exactly to an inch of all the mineral wonders that he saw 
beneath the surface. So strongly did the imagination of 
this fetich act upon his workmen, simple old German 
immigrants from the mother-land of superstition as they 
were, that they affirmed with all their faith, that when at 
work at the bottom of their shaft they could distinctly hear 
invisible agents laughing, talking, pounding, picking be- 
neath their feet, removing the treasure downward out of 
reach ; for of course they never found it. 

Now if all this, and a thousand times more of it, be 
possible in our day, in this fresh land of honest, open work, 
compelling nature to say all and no more than what she 
knows — to do all and no more than what she has the 
power to do; leaving no hole or corner of the globe an 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 273 

unexplored retreat of the mysterious ; with libraries full of 
demonstrations of the exact ability of every created agency 
to harm or heal us ; with public schools to save our sons 
and daughters from the ineradicable first infection of this 
superstition of the fetich, how overwhelming a deluge of 
it must have submerged the early souls of men; those 
hapless savages, who trembled at every leaf-fall, and fled 
with averted faces from every natural object a little out of 
the ordinary shape.* What more inevitable than that 
such shapes as isolated pillars of rock, stones curiously 
perched on peaks and movable by the hand's touch, and 
ambrose stones, cheese-rings, boulders in river currents, 
labyrinthine caves and horrid clefts between high crags, 
made grandly vocal with the voice of cataracts, and with 
the awful roar of beasts ; what more inevitable than that 
these objects of nature should come to be feared and 
worshipped ? f 

This was sure to be the case, when they imitated even 
in the least degree the forms of man or beast. Such a 
pillar of red saliferous sandstone, capped by a fragment of 
a layer of white limestone, as the traveller may see stand- 
ing half way up the mountain side/and overlooking the west 
shore of the Dead Sea, was sure to have some horrible 
Lot's-wife legend attached to it. Two months ago as I 
passed along the southern shore of the Gulf of St Law- 
rence, rounding the point of Gaspe, I saw a rock called the 
Old Man, and was told that some few years ago another 
stood beside it, called the Old Woman, but the surf had 
carried that away. The ocean is a great artificer of such 
rude effigies, making and breaking them wherever there 
are suitable rocks on any coast. And the ancient savages 
were fishermen, and lived upon the coast, and sailed 
among these cliffs ; and many a father's dead body was 
found near some remarkable rock, which grew to be the 
special object of his children's reverence ; and many a 
legend of dead warriors got mingled up with new-formed 

* See good instances mentioned by Livingstone. 

f See m ' Harper ' of November the account of the Indian worship of 
Mount Popocatapetl, 'the smoking mountain.' See the picture and 
description of Mount Barkal, in Upper Egypt, by Lepsius, Reise. See 
also the views of the cleft mountain behind Delphi, in Greece, and the 
cleft rock in front of the temple of Philce. 

18 



274 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 

prodigies of the erosive powers of the sea; transitions 
from ancestral worship to fetich worship, and mixtures of 
the two. In this way we can explain the frequency of 
legends of animated stones, and human beings turned to 
stones, and in fact all the phenomena of early idolatry, 
together with that other class of legends wherein trees are 
substituted for rocks, maidens changed into laurel and 
myrtle and cypress, spirits confined in oaks, and the whole 
range of similar superstitions. But I shall show you 
hereafter that even for these superstitions there was a solid 
historical basis, apart from all disposition in the human 
imagination to personify and deify or diabolize the benefi- 
cent and noxious qualities of natural things. We must 
ne^er forget that Druid priests lived under oaks, and their 
spirits were supposed to haunt them afterwards. The 
hunter who fell from the rock was supposed to become 
identified with the rock. Superstition acts upon material 
objects to convert them into fetiches just as heat acts upon 
a bar of iron to make of it a magnet. It was not the height 
of the rocky summit that evoked the savage's devotion, 
but the remembrance of some salvation there ; it was his 
Ararat. It was not the tickled fancy which grew reverent 
before the natural rocking-stone. It was its unaccountable 
and imposing resemblance to the boat which had been to 
his race both mother and father in one — obtaining for him 
food in life, saving him in storms from death, and furnish- 
ing him with a burial-place — that made him reverent. 

But the intellectual ground of fetich worship is now, and 
always has been, ignorance of natural history. The fetich 
is the first physical object which strikes the bewildered eye 
as wanting its own explanation. In this sense the range 
of the fetich is immense. It is not confined to sticks and 
stones. It ascends to the platform of classic art. The 
Greek priests made their statues live and move and speak 
and weep, as Romish priests do now. Memnon's statue 
with its sunrise music was a splendid fetich. 

We can ascend still higher. I have mentioned the wor- 
ship of gems, endowed with superhuman intelligence. 
But there is a far more refined fetichism than that. The 
whole system of the Cabala is built upon it. In ancient 
times extraordinary powers were assigned to words and 
numbers. They were treated as entities, powerful entities. 



X.] EELIGIOUS WOESHIP. 275 

You know how full the stories of the Thousand Nights are 
of this. The name of Solomon was the most powerful of 
all fetiches. He who could speak it rightly could bind 
and loose spirits, fly like a bird, and, in fact, command all 
the powers of nature. The King of the Genii was confined 
thousands of years in a casket merely because Solomon's 
seal was upon it. The story has been repeated in many 
forms. Asmodeus was thus shut up in a modern magi- 
cian's phial. No satisfactory explanation of this class of 
superstitions has ever been published, to my knowledge. 
It must have some basis in real life. Primal error, which 
is a nothing, cannot bear fruit. The Pythagorean system 
of Philosophy turned on the magic powers of numbers. 
There is a great disposition in the human mind to dwell on 
coincidences. We are fascinated by the magic square, for 
instance, which adds up the same in all directions. I was 
once introduced to a learned Rabbinical scholar living in 
Berlin. His room was so full of tobacco smoke when I 
entered it that I could hardly discern his form at the far end. 
But I soon found that his head was so much fuller of tal- 
mudic and cabalistic lore that it was impossible to see any 
truth through that fog. He assured me that there was such 
power in a name, that the moment of the christening of a 
child was the most solemn and sublime of all the moments 
in his history. For as he was named so he became. The 
name had the power of destiny, and involved in its own 
letters all the events of that child's existence. 

Now how could such a curious system of fetichism 
arise ? I have given you the explanation, in part, in my 
lecture on the alphabet. The letters of a name are sym- 
bolic ; their conjunction was cabalistic. But fully to com- 
prehend the importance of a word to the old nations, one 
must imagine for himself the rise of the secret priesthoods, 
the sacred mysteries, the freemasonries with their signs and 
pass words.* Solomon was the representative Cell Man, 
or Cabalist, head of all the orders of freemasons, clerical 
and lay, so to speak, that have ever existed, f His name 

* *m DaBaK, Hebrew, a word, is the same as "at DeBiR, the taber- 
nacle of Jehovah. 

t Solomon, Shalmanezer, Carloraan, Charlemagne, such names are may- 
poles upon which have been hung all the garlands of mythology, for the 
nations to dance around. Solomon calls himself (if he wrote the book) 



276 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 

was, in fact, the embodied idea of the Mystery; it stood 
for the whole body of occult lore. But it therefore stood 
for the whole political power of the initiated classes. Its 
rise by any man was a guarantee of his good standing in 
the society, of responsibility as a messenger, of authority 
as an agent. All the spirits of the throne and the pulpit, 
the work-bench and the writing-table, were obedient to it. 
Hence, legends like that of Prospero and Ariel; Faust 
and Mephistopheles ; Friar Bacon and Father Bungay; 
legends so devised as to conceal the real spirits, the real 
magicians, and the real words-of-command ; but legends 
which, doing this work for their inventors, did also another 
for themselves, infused into the common people of every 
race a fresh and more subtle spirit of mystic fetichism, so 
penetrating and intangible in its character, that the wisest, 
most learned, and most holy men of modern times have 
not escaped its influence. For, 

One step more, and we reach the highest grade of 
fetichism ; rising insensibly from all before described. 
What is an orthodox creed, but a mystic word-fetich ? 
Look at the wafer elevated by the Romish priest in the 
sacrifice of the mass, as a piece of God-man — thousands 
prostrate before it, not daring even to look at it, so awful 
is their dread of its power to bless them and to curse 
them, to annihilate them instantly ! Yet that is merely a 
thing-fetich. Look now at that dogma, elevated by the 
Protestant preacher before the logical understanding of 
his audience, whose souls He prostrate in the dust before 
it, not daring to use their reason on it, or to look it for a 
moment in the face, believing, as they must, that to doubt 
it is to be damned ! That is a word-fetich. 

What is the school of Gaussen and Hengstenberg 
among theologians, but a sect of Christianity retiring 
from the noble reverence and practice of the Spirit of 
Christ and his apostles, and from the sublime conceptions 
of the Hebrew poets, and dropping backward and down- 
ward on to the ground of literal fetichism ; worshipping 

in the beginning of Ecclesiastes, the Cabalist, or quelt (ribp,) which our 
translators have rendered preacher, without knowing that to preach = to 
bark, i. e. to speak oracularly (Arkitely) ; as, to pray — to bray ; and as, 
to gabble, or talk gibberish = to gobble, i, e. to speak cabalistically, or in 
a manner unintelligible to the uninitiated or common people. 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 277 

the letter which, Christ says it, must kill ; and converting 
the literature of all the Hebrew ages from David and Solo- 
mon to James and John into a gilt-edged quarto bound in 
calf; putting a more fatal stop to the progress of the Chris- 
tian Church towards its millennial purity than ever did the 
golden calf which arrested the progress of Israel into their 
promised land ! There are multitudes of Christians living 
now who entertain so strongly the old Jewish reverence 
for the word Jehovah, that they bring themselves to pro- 
nounce it only with a strenuous effort of the reason and the 
will combined. It is not simply from reverence for the in- 
finite God whose special name it is supposed to be — but 
reverence for the word ; because it was for ages one of the 
great world-fetiches, and called 'the unpronounceable/ 
Laymen had no right to take it on their lips. It was a 
privilege of clergy. It was fetich — or tabu — for the out- 
side masses. Why ? Because it lay at the heart of the 
special religious system of the Hebrews : because it was 
the supposed formula of Unitarian doctrine as opposed to 
all idolatry; because it was translated 'the living God/ 
and itself shared a sort of weird life ; because it was the 
word-temple in which dwelt the shekinah of all transcend- 
ental science ; veiled, but ready to break forth in fire and 
light ; veiled like Isis, but before which the initiated priests 
might worship, trembling and alone. It was, therefore, to 
the ancient Jew, and still is to the devout but superstitious 
Christian, an awful silent logos. 

In a still more, distant east, we have another instance of 
an unpronounceable word, a fetich formula, the key to the 
mysteries of another system of religious worship : I refer, 
of course, to the sacred syllable ATJM of the Brahmans. It 
is said to be of no known specific meaning, but to involve 
in some way the idea of the Trinity. Now we know what 
the Hindu trinity is : Brahma, Yishnu, Siva ; the maker, 
preserver, destroyer. But why these three are so related 
to each other and to human history, or how they can be 
distinguished by the letters A TJ M (or any other mode of 
spelling Oil), has not been clearly stated ; nOr can I venture 
to demand your long attention this evening to what I 
would consider the true demonstration of the curious 
problem. I should make it on Arkite grounds ; by which 
I mean, that the word itself, as pronounced, has always 






278 THE F0UE TYPES OP [LECT. 

been the symbol of Arkite mystery, secrecy, and initiation ; 
being the representative of the roar or murmur of the 
great deep. Mim is the Hebrew name for the waters of 
the sea.* Ainim is the Hebrew name for multitudes of 
peoples, the roar of which goes up as the voice of many 
waters. I have shown you that the shape of the letter M 
was obtained from the water-waved surface of the sea. 
You are all probably sufficiently acquainted with the 
pictures of the Hindu pantheon to recognize in Vishnu 
the Fish- Noah, or god of the waters, sleeping upon a coiled 
serpent, the symbol of water, and representing the pre- 
serving genius of the ark. Brahma as the father-creator 
represents the genius of the mountain. And Siva, the 
destroyer, his name being identical with the Typhon of 
the west, represents the devouring deluge. Then, al- 
though the three letters A U M are of western form, and 
the analogous Sanscrit letters have been so changed as to 
conceal their old meanings, the identity of the A with Brah- 
ma, U with Vishnu, and M with Siva, follows as a matter 
of course ; and there is no longer any wonder that this 
Om is too dreadful a fetich to be pronounced, and too 
sacred to be taught by any Brahman to a man of any 
other caste. And yet, in spite of the prohibition, it has 
escaped. It leaked out, into many languages, in the earliest 
times. It formed part of many of the most sacred western 
words ; such as, Omphalos, the navel, a name for the 
Delphic oracle; Triomjohe, the cry or watchword of the 
priests of Bacchus; umber and imber, darkness and storm; 
amber, f the precious electron found floating on the waves. 
The Irish Druids called by this name, Omh,J the living 
God, and defined its meaning ( He who is/ There is very 
little doubt that it is the Ob, or spirit of divination, men- 
tioned in the Hebrew scriptures, and the Obi, or necro- 
mantic power, of the blacks of Western Africa. It is not 

* Egyptian ham-ham, to roar (Bunsen, vol. i. p. 462); Coptic 
7iem,-hem, to roar ; hm, to fish, p. 463 ; mhi, to draw water, p. 469 ; mah, 
water (Bunsen cites Leemans, viii. xiv. xvi. for this, on p. 468). 

f Am, Egyptian, gem or pearl. Bunsen, p. 455 (Coptic ana-mei), and 
anm (p. 456). — See the word discussed in the Appendix. 

X Cf. Amn, Egyptian name of Jupiter, Coptic amoun ; and also the Egyp- 
tian verb, to conceal ; Coptic amoni. Compare with this the Amen of the 
Hebrew, and the Egyptian ma (Coptic me, mei), truth, true. Cf. also 
amut (Coptic amen-t), Hades ; and am-t (cf. ouom), devourer. 



X.] KELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 279 

impossible that it occurs in such modern words as humbug; 
for the second syllable of that word is undoubtedly (like 
bugger, and bugaboo) the Scythian bog, once meaning 
god (Bacchus), and now devil. It probably occurs in our 
word Umpire , or judge in equity, but refers in this case 
not to the man, but to the bar, or court, whose laws he 
but administered. 

The unpronounceable divine name among the Hebrews is 
perhaps the best introduction we could have to the history 
of the third type of religious worship, which I have now 
to describe. 

III. The worship of the gods in heaven. 

You may remember that our first type of religion in- 
volved the worship which the early inhabitants of the 
earth paid, and many of its present inhabitants still pay, to 
their dead parents and ancestors. The second type of 
religion, the last described, coeval in its origin and co- 
extensive in its duration with the first, was fetichism, the 
worship of the powers of nature, as expressed unintel- 
ligibly or magically in the objects of sense — mountains and 
seas, rocks and trees, sounds in the air, works of art, and 
words and creeds constructed by the priests. 

Now the third type of religion is the worship of the 
invisible God as a creator, preserver, benefactor, and judge. 

It has been the central question of all critical theology, 
how this religious conception was generated in the soul 
of man. Was it aboriginal ? Or has it been developed 
gradually by civilization ? Was it revealed at first ? Or did 
it reside as an innate co-essential germ of intelligence in the 
human intellect as such ? Was it the common property of 
the earliest people and afterwards lost amid the sins and 
miseries of migrating races, enslaved races, isolated races, 
perishing races ? Or was it committed as a sacred and 
peculiar privilege to one chosen people, for safe keeping 
until the fulness of times had come, and the Son of God 
was revealed, and the new dispensation was inaugurated, 
and the apostles were sent forth to fill the earth with the light 
and warmth of that 'life eternal, which is the knowledge 
of the true God, and of Jesus Christ whom he hath sent.'' 

Of these theories, the last is held to be the true one by 
orthodox Christians. But it is opposed in many points to 
the results of that criticism of the religious history of man- 



280 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 

kind which the modern sciences have forced the honest 
seekers after truth to undertake. Of course I will not 
have time this evening to pursue the discussion far. But 
I must at least point out the place where men of science 
stand to view the rise of the divine idea in man, — that 
glorious sunrise of the soul — the only sunrise in the 
history of mankind. 

The idea of an invisible God finds its only analogy in 

j the knowledge which the domestic relations give to chil- 
dren of their parents. It is reasonable, therefore, that it 

| sprang, as a natural development, out of the worship of 
dead ancestors. If the idea of God be that of a being 
invisible, creative, provident, protective, and judicial, it 
differs in no respect from a combination of the two ideas 
of a living father, and a father who has entered his eternal 
mansion. Do you object, however, that the idea of God is 
far grander ? I grant it : but that is a matter of degrees. 
The definition of the young minister, which took by storm 
the suffrages of the Assembly of the Westminster Divines : 
— ' God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his 
being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and 
truth/ was the glorious consummation of all the religions 
feeling and reasoning of all ages, — the flower of human 
thought, ripened in the choicest soil of the last deposits of 
the waters of civilization. Wisdom, power, justness, 
goodness, truth ! What are these but human attributes, 
on which the whole superstructure of ancestral worship 
has been built ? But the three epithets, Infinite, Eternal, 
and Unchangeable, are transcendental ideas, evolved by 
science ; abstractions, only possible to well-formed, well- 
bred brains; enlargements of the savage notion of a 
father's character by civilized thinkers, whose material 
horizon has been widened by travel ; whose astronomy has 
changed its starry firmament into realms of interstellar 
space ; whose lives of leisure have allowed free scope for 
poetry as well as practice ; and made love, not fear, the 
law of thought. Love is, like heat, the great expander. 
God is a product of philanthropy.* The shivering, 

* Benevolence is an unknown instinct in the lower animals until they 
are domesticated with mankind ; for their love of offspring is not only 
selfish, but provisional, and in all its exhibitions savage and cruel. Bene- 
volence is foreign also to the animal part of man's economy; the 



X.] EELIGIOUS WOESHIP. 281 

hungry, timorous savage of the earliest days had not 
enough of love about his house to make a small- sized god 
of. Infinite ! Eternal ! Unchangeable ! Men could begin 
to comprehend such epithets — to invent them rudely, I 
should rather say — when they began to build pyramids and 
' eternal mansions 3 for their departed great : but not 
before. 

We find, therefore, no trace of our idea of Deity in the 
earliest history of mankind. The Hebrew writers report 
indeed such traces ; but their reports are not evidence 
because not contemporary. They only go to show what 
was the idea of God among the Jews after the times of 
David, subsequent to whom all their Scriptures seem to 
have been written. Or, if the earlier books should be 
considered as compilations from fragments of an older 
time — an opinion now placed almost above discussion — 
such fragments prove, not that our idea of God existed at 
the beginning of history, but,' on the contrary, that it did 
not so exist. You will find an admirable resumti of the 
evidence of the truth of this statement in Chapter V. of a 
book by William Rathbone Greg, entitled Creed of 
Christendom. You need, however, merely refresh your 
biblical memories, and recall a few texts, to see at once 
that the common notion of a special revelation to the 
Jews, as a peculiar people, of the fact of the existence of 
One God, has no foundation whatever. 

Milman and others speak of the pure monotheism of the 
Jews as a singular phenomenon, confined to the narrow 
strip of land called Palestine, where { the worship of one 
Almighty Creator of the universe subsisted as its only 
sanctuary, and where, in every stage of society, under the 
pastoral tent of Abraham, and in the sumptuous temple of 
Solomon, the same creed maintained its inviolable sim- 

stomach laughs at it ; but the savage is little else than a reasoning 
stomach ; he immolates his parents, and exposes his children, when they 
cease to benefit his own life, or gratify his own desires. Benevolence did 
not enter — could not enter into the early idea of a God. The Hebrew 
Jehovah is a selfish personage. The Christian God is Love itself. It is 
not made out whether good is from god, or god from good ; or whether 
indeed there is any direct connection between these words. In the 
Appendix will be found a table of words, in 52 languages, standing 
for the ideas of God, Spirit, Angel, and Devil, which the reader may find 
useful. 



282 THE F0UK TYPES OF [LECT. 

plicity.'* No ! Their own writings show that they were 
incessantly and unconquerably idolatrous. No punish- 
. ments could cure them. The High Priest of Jehovah 
is described as worshipping the Egyptian Apis, while 
Jehovah was thundering his law to this high priest's 
brother, on the top of the mountain, before their eyes. 
And when that law came down in his hands, it contained 
no notice of the doctrine of an only true God. Its first 
commandment merely forbade the people, to whom it was 
sent, from worshipping any other than their own God. 

The fact is evident, that Jehovah was the family God of 
the Abrahamidas ; and therefore became subsequently the 
national God of the Hebrews. I do not mean by this, a 
family god in the sense of the ancestral worship ; but a 
god, considered by the Hebrew progenitors of David and 
Solomon, whoever they were, as the lar or hatfjuov of their 
house. It looks as if it were an adopted deity, adopted 
by the Hebrews (if they were Hyksos) from the Egyptian 
FIJK PXJ NTJK, the ( unknown God/ the male Isis, whose 
veil could not be raised ; the god who refused to tell his 
worshippers his name ; a name, in fact, in process of in- 
vention^ The story reads that this God called Abram out 
of Ur of the Chaldees ; of course the call came from the 
God at his own home — in Palestine; he was a western 
deity. The story says that Abram/ s parents worshipped 
other gods (although in Gen. xxxi. 53, we read, ' the God 
of Abraham, the God of Nachor, the God of their fathers 
judge betwixt us' !), and that his children's cousins at the 
old eastern homestead continued to do so afterwards. The 
Jehovah was evidently a western deity. His "other Hebrew 
name, Adonai, shows this still more plainly ; for it is the 
Adonis of the Syrian worship, and was introduced into 
the pantheon of Egypt by Amenoph IV., a Pharaoh of the 
18th dynasty, who took this God's name instead of Am- 
nion's in his own, calling himself no longer Amen-oph, but 
Khou-en-Aten, or the splendour of the solar disc. Aten, 
1 the radiant disc,' was then the Syrian Baal- Adonis, intro- 
duced into Egypt by the Hyksos of the previous (17th) 
dynasty, under the name of Sutech. How it happened that 
a native Pharaoh, a lineal descendant of Amosis, the ex- 

* Hist. Jews, i. 4. f See Appendix to p. 300. 



X.] EELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 283 

peller of the Hyksos (through Amenopli I., Thouttnes I. 
and III., Amenopli II., Thoutmes IV., and Amenopli 
III.), should forsake Ammon, persecute the old Egyptian 
ceremonial, and become a fanatical propagandist of a 
special form of Hyksos- Shemite faith, can only be ex- 
plained by reference to the fact that his mother was a 
foreigner. Her pictures at Tel-Amarna have rose-coloured 
(i. e. northern- coloured) flesh. His own most extraor- 
dinary profile hints at a strange and tragic family origin ; 
while similarly strange-faced priests, standing around his 
figure, at the altar, on the monuments, intimate that his 
reign was a temporary revolution in favour of the only 
half-expelled and half-suppressed Hyksos population of the 
Delta — a momentary triumph of that worship, every trace of 
which the next Pharaoh (Horus) did his best to obliterate ; 
but which still survived, in secret, under his successor, 
Seti I., the founder of the 19th dynasty, and then 
was re-established as the worship of Seth, by the great 
Ramses II. and his unfortunate son Menephtha, the so- 
called Pharaoh of the Exodus. 

Thus a direct connection is established between the 
Mosaic worship of Jehovah-Adonai, the Hyksos worship 
of Seth-Aten, and the later Israelitish worship of Baal- 
Adonis ; and any noble character discoverable in the first 
must be related to what natural refinements the already 
long-existing civilizations of those countries had already 
been enabled to produce. In later times we are express- 
ly told that the Jews of the twelve tribes worshipped 
Jehovah and Baal together. 

But not to hurry on too fast, let us remount from the 
19th to the 12th dynasty, and return from Moses to 
Abraham; for men's ideas are wonderfully changed in 
fifteen hundred years, or even in five hundred, to take the 
Hebrew chronology for our guide. 

The legends of Abranr's God Jehovah exhibit him to us 
in the most anthropomorphic garb, — the least spiritual and 
Christian possible. He sits with Abraham at the door of 
his tent. He eats with him ; getting into an angry alter- 
cation with Sarah, the patriarch's old wife. He discusses 
with him the case of Sodom and Gomorrah; informing 
him that he was on his way thither to see if the reports he 
had heard of their wickedness were correct. 



284 THE POUR TYPES OP [LECT. 

The legends of Isaac and Jacob are equally explicit and 
compromising to the god they praise. They describe 
Jacob's family as idolaters, and Jacob himself as only 
gathering their idols together and hiding them nnder an 
oak (Gen. xxxv. 2 — 4) when he approached the domain of 
his western family deity. They tell a story of the cun- 
ning fellow regularly bargaining with Jehovah to take 
him for his God on certain conditions, and promising a 
tithe of his possessions if Jehovah would fulfil his part of 
the contract (Gen. xxviii. 20). To whom the tithes were 
to be paid, or for what end, is not stated ; but this mention 
of an arrangement of tithes betrays the late date of the 
history in which the story occurs. 

It was not until the Abrahamidse came in contact with the 
civilization of Egypt that we begin to see any tendency of 
their Jehovah worship to rise to a higher intellectual level. 
Moses — a character representing the New Egyptian phase 
of Hebrew (or Hyksos ?) life — takes one great step in ad- 
vance of his forerunners. But even Moses makes no claim 
of sole existence for his nation's deity ; but only insists 
that he is superior to all other gods ; the Jehovah Elohim, 
Lord of lords, and God of gods. 

In Exodus xv. 11, he is made to say, f Who is like thee, 
O Jehovah, among the gods?' He is always represented 
as speaking to Pharaoh of Jehovah not as Supreme Ruler 
of heaven and earth, but as the God of the Hebrews ; and 
to the Hebrews, 'I am Jehovah thy God, who brought 
thee out of the house of bondage ; thou shalt have no other 
gods beside (or before) me.' What is true of the legends 
of Moses is equally true of those of his successor. In the 
24th chapter, Joshua is made to urge upon the people 
fidelity to Jehovah, not at all on the ground of an ex- 
alted Monotheism, but because it would be the blackest 
ingratitude in them not to prefer the God who had heaped 
such favours upon them to all other deities. The sub- 
sequent records of the nation, as far as they can be con- 
sidered historical, become a monstrous paradox in psycho- 
logical research, if we suppose that there existed at that 
time in the Hebrew mind any idea of one true God such as 
we possess. 

In fine, these records are full of charges against them of 
infidelity to Jehovah, but do not contain one single charge 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 285 

against them of Atheism on that account. No wonder ! 
Do these records ever describe Jehovah in language such 
as a modern civilized thinker would dare to use ? On the 
contrary, they tell us that Jehovah said to Moses : Let 
them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them 
(Exod. xxv. 8, 21, 22). Put the cover on the ark, and 
there will I talk to thee. And Jehovah spake with 
Moses face to face as a man with his friend (Exod. xxxiii. 
9, 11). And Jehovah said, I will put thee in a cleft of 
the rock, and will cover thee with my hand, while I pass 
by, and thou shalt see my back parts (Exod. xxxiii. 21 — 
24). Moses is described as piquing the amour propre of 
the Hebrews, by telling them how it was reported among 
the surrounding nations that Jehovah was their God and 
was seen by them face to face (Numb. xiv. 14). He is de- 
scribed as pleading with Jehovah when very angry, and 
nobly offering himself as a victim to his wrath, and thus 
gaining a respite and commutation of their punishment ; 
which, however, involved an entire change of the whole 
programme of the Exodus, a change of base for their 
military operations, and the postponement of their invasion 
of Palestine for the mystic number of 40 years. 

Surely all this is merely a slight modification of those far 
more ancient and semi-savage ideas of deity, which ap- 
pear in the legends of the creation and of the flood, where 
Jehovah is said to make woman out of a rib of man; 
to take Noah and f shut him into the ark ; ' ' to smell a 
sweet savour/ when Noah, liberated, made his first sacrifice ; 
to invent the rainbow ; and to promise no more ( to curse 
the ground for man's sake/ 

But time went on. The wars of settlement, the civil 
feuds of rival judges, came to an end. The poet warrior 
and the regal philosopher sat in turn upon the throne of 
Zion. Peace bore its proper fruit ; commerce enlarged the 
native genius of the Jew. Priesthoods devised grand 
ceremonials. The discussion of false mysteries sharpened 
the souFs perception of the true, as alchemy in our day 
led on to chemistry. Luxury bred vice, and the miseries 
of despotism generated a reactionary patriotism. The 
school of the sacrificers found itself confronted by the 
school of the sacrificed. Prophets arose to denounce 
the priest, and die for it. But as they died, the heavens 



286 THE FOUR TYPES OP [LECT. 

opened, and they caught those visions of the one true 
God which were to become the living, realities of after 
ages. Calamities crushed in upon the little remnant of 
that kingdom which David founded, and Solomon illumin- 
ated with his taste and wisdom, idolater and sensualist as 
he was. The poor ' favoured people - ' were meal between 
the millstones of Egypt and Babylon, ground to the finest 
flour. Their anthropomorphic deity vanished like a power- 
less, mocking spectre before the irresistible wind raised 
by migrating nations. But in its place arose the sun in a 
sky which, if not clear, was hot and bright. The abstract 
idea of God as a unit, an Infinite one, on whose strong 
arm Nature the mother, and Man her baby child, could 
always lean with confidence and ever- springing hope — of 
God the sole creator, sole sustainer, sole judge and exe- 
cutioner of justice — penetrated that broken mass of 
Hebrew people, as the alkaline waters of the drainage of 
the rain penetrate disturbed and fractured regions of the 
earth's crust, permeating the entire substance, metamor- 
phosing, crystallizing, and charging it with veins of the 
precious metals. 

It is impossible not to see that the God of the priests 
and the God of the prophets of Israel — and the same is 
true in our day— were two very different deities ; the 
embodiment of two very different classes of ideas. ' Let 
any one, (says Greg) ' compare the partial, unstable, re- : 
vengeful, and deceitful God of Exodus and Numbers, with 
the sublime and unique Deity of Job and the nobler 
Psalms ; or even the God of Ezekiel and Daniel with the i 
God of Isaiah ; and he can scarcely fail to admit that the 
conception of the one living and true God was a plant of ■ 
slow and gradual growth in the Hebrew mind, and was 
due — not to Moses, the patriarchs, or the priests, but to 
the superiority of individual minds at various periods of 
their history/ This plant of Aryan growth was first 
planted in the mountains of Judea, when Solomon, estab- 
lishing his kingdom ' from the great River Euphrates 
to the Western Sea/ brought his people into contact with 
the pure Zoroastrian monotheism of the Persian plateau ; 
and it came to flower when, several centuries afterwards, 
c the chosen people ' were banished from their native hills 
to hang their harps upon the willows of Babylon; or 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 287 

rather, we may say, were sent to school, tribe after- tribe, 
back to the lands where their original ancestors first drew 
the breath of life. 

It was Solomon who first learned how to say, ' Behold, the 
heaven of heavens cannot contain thee, how much less this 
house which I have built ? ' * ' The eyes of Jehovah are 
everywhere, beholding the evil and the good/ f 

It was no priest or Levite of the temple service, but 
David the young shepherd poet, or more likely yet, some 
later prophet, whose verses, equally dear to the hearts of 
all humanity, came to be sung under that all overshadow- 
ing name, who chanted — ' Whither shall I go from thy 
spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence ? 3 ' Thou 
coverest thyself with light as with a garment; thou art 
clothed with honour and majesty.'' ' Jehovah ! who shall 
abide in thy tent ? who shall dwell on thy sacred tumulus ? 
He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, 
and speaketh the truth heartily. For the word of Je- 
hovah is right, and all his works are done in truth/ 
' He loveth righteousness and judgment. Lying lips are 
his abomination. But true dealers are his delight/ ' The 
counsel of Jehovah standeth for ever/ ' Thou desirest 
not sacrifice, else would I give it. Thou delightest not in 
burnt- offering/ ' The world is mine and the fulness 
thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, and drink the blood 
of goats ? If I were hungry would I tell thee ? Offer unto 
Grod thanksgiving/ % 

It was no Hebrew priest or Levite, but some Idumean 
sheikh of the eastern desert, who lived, it would seem from 
the best philological criticism, long after the days of Solo- 
mon, who said all those fine things in the Book of Job, 
like, l Lo, he goeth by me, but I perceive him not/ ( How 
should a man be just with God ? he cannot answer him for 
one of a thousand. For he is not man, as I am, that we should 
come together in judgment. Shall a man be more pure 
than his Maker ? ' || 

The fine words which are put into the mouth of the first 

* 1 Kings viii. Cf. Svvaoai St aii icavrod duovtiv 'Avkgi Krjdofi'ev^. Iliad, 
16. 514. 

f Prov. XV. Cf. Qtoi tcl Ttavra loaciv. Odys. 4. 379. 

J Psalms xxxiii., 1., li., civ., cxxxix. ; Prov. xv, 

|| Job ix., xi. 



288 THE FOUR TYPES OF [LECT. 

of the prophets, the reputed teacher of David, r The 
strength of Israel will not lie, nor repent, for he is not a 
man to repent/ * give us still the narrow idea of a national 
god, and not of the universal and only God of the later 
prophets, such as was known to the author of the Book 
of Ecclesiastes, who threw the same idea into a much 
larger mould : ' I know that whatsoever God doeth shall 
be for ever; nothing can be put to it nor nothing taken 
from it/ f 

It was in the midst of the desolations of Israel by the 
hordes of Mesopotamia that the greatest of the prophets 
expressed the Zoroastrian faith in those sublime words, 
' To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto 
me ? saith Jehovah.'' J 

And it was in the last convulsions of national extinction 
that the Prophet Micah proposed and answered the 
same awful question in the still sublimer words : 
' Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, and bow myself 
before the Highest God ? With burnt-offerings, calves of 
a- year old ? Will he be pleased with thousands of rams, 
or ten thousands of rivers of oil ? Shall I give my firstborn 
for my transgression ; the fruit of my body for the sin of 
my soul ? He hath showed thee, . man, what is good. 
And what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, 
to love mercy, and to walk humbly before thy God ! ' || 

Thy God ! The cycle is complete. The God of Abraham 
had become the God of the ten tribes ; the God of Israel had 
grown to be the God of all ; and now this God of mankind 
is about to come incarnate to the individual soul, to claim 
his last and highest throne of all. 

It was the propagation of these splendid conceptions of 
deity, subsequent to the Babylonian captivity, and after 
they had come under the Zoroastrian influence of Persia, 
which cured the Jews of infidelity to Jehovah, made them 
self-sacrificing Unitarians to the end of time, and pre- 
pared the way for the founding of the Christian Church. 
And we are probably to explain the rapid spread of Chris- 
tianity at the outset, by the wide diffusion of Jewish ideas, 
previous to the birth of Christ, among the sober-minded 
Gentiles of Western Asia and the Boman empire. But 

* 1 Sam. xv, f Eccl. iii. % Isaiah i. || Micah vi. 



X.] EELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 289 

there resulted thence a strange mixture of monotheism 
with polytheism before the Christian Era, corresponding 
to the mixture of Christianity with every form of local 
heathenism which happened afterwards. 

Professor Sophocles has lately published an ancient 
epitaph, dug up recently by a seeker for treasures of another 
sort, near the little town of Zerbhokhia in Magnesia. I 
will give you his translation of it.* 

( No other corpse, whether of a man or of a woman, is 
permitted to be deposited in this vault. And if any one 
shall recklessly dare to open it, he will anger the most 
great, the King, the Almighty Maker of all things ; and 
all the gods, and goddesses, and demigods, and the lady 
queen herself. For the depositing of any other corpse with 
these is forbidden once for all/ 

We could not have a better description than this 
epitaph affords us of that mixed or primitive theism which 
pervades the older Hebrew or Mosaic Scriptures, and 
which gave place to a grander and purer monotheism 
among the prophets of a later age. 

The date of the beginning of this change then, would be 
about 1000 years before Christ. "We find in the Hindu 
Scriptures of that date evidences of a similar growth of 
the religious mind. ( In the oldest portions of the hymns 
[of the Rig Veda, the most ancient of the Sanscrit books] 
we discover,' says Mr Muir, the latest and best English 
writer on this subject, 'few traces of any such abstract 
conceptions of the Deity. They disclose a much more 
primitive stage of religious belief. They are the produc- 
tions of simple men, who, under the influence of the most 
impressive phenomena of nature, saw everywhere the 
presence and agency of divine powers, who imagined that 
each of the great provinces of the universe was directed 
and animated by its own separate deity, and who had not 
yet risen to a clear idea of one Supreme Creator and 
governor of all things.' f 

The hymns of the Eig Yeda are hymns to Agni the god 
of Fire, Surya the god of the Sun, Indra the god of Storms, 
addressed each under a variety of names, and strangely 
mixed up together, and sometimes actually identified with 

* Journ. R. Asiat. Soc, New Series, i. 2, p. 339. 

t Proe. Amer. Acad. p. 77, 1801 

19 



290 THE FOUE TYPES OF [LECT. 

one another. But, as Muir and others have shown, there 
are strains in these ancient hymns which seem to come from 
some inner sanctuary, revealing a conception of divinity 
more spiritual and universal than the general tenour of the 
hymns. The grades of this spiritualism involved in the 
general materialism of the Vedic hymns are various. The 
reader can, as it were, watch the expansion of the poetic 
idea. Varuna is described as dwelling in a palace of a 
thousand columns, and a thousand doors,* before he is 
described as dwelling in all worlds, as sovereign ruler, 
possessed of illimitable resources, meting out, creating, 
and upholding the heavens and the earth. f The different 
earliest deities had their different admirers and special 
devotees. Bach deity was praised in strains as exalted as 
the capacity of the worshipper, and as the growth of the 
religious ideas of his age. Hence, as the notions of space 
and time became enlarged, and the powers of abstract 
thought were cultivated, the pantheon swelled to colossal 
proportions ; and each separate deity belonging to it be- 
came to his own worshippers the infinite and eternal God 
of gods ; while yet retaining his own distinctive name and 
some relics of his original, local, and specific character. 

The resemblance between the poetic imagery of the 
Hebrew and Hindu Scriptures of that ancient date is 
strikingly in harmony with the ethnological derivation of 
the Abrahamidse from the land of Brahma. The Hebrew 
poet sings : ( The eyes of Jehovah are in every place be- 
holding the evil and the good,' The Yedic poet sings ; 
' Varuna, the mighty ruler of the worlds, sees as if close at 
hand/ The Hebrew : ( Whither can I flee from thy pre- 
sance ? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there ! If I 
make my bed in the grave, thou art there ! If I take the 
wings of the morning, and fly into the uttermost parts of 
the sea, even there will thy right hand uphold me/ — is 
echoed by the Sanscrit : ' The earth belongs to Yaruna 
the King, and the mighty sky whose ends are far away ; 
the seas are his loins, though he lives in the smallest pool ; 
let one flee beyond the furthest skies, he should not escape 
Yaruna the King, whose messengers descend from heaven 

* Rig Veda, ii. 41. 5 ; v. 62. 6 ; vii. 88. 5. 

t Ibid. iv. 42. 3, 4 ; vi. 70. 1; vii. 86. 1 ; 87. 5, 6; viii. 41. 4, 5. 10; 
42.1. 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 291 

and thousand-eyed traverse the earth/ There is in the 
Hebrew poems a sad, sweet, noble simplicity and intense 
spiritual personality, which is not so perceptible in their 
Indian contemporaries. There is also in them an absence 
of gross mistakes and exaggerations, which place them 
on an eminence unapproachable by the admirers of their 
Sanscrit rivals ; yet the common propriety which both 
these holy literatures have in all the essential elements of 
the divine idea is unmistakable. 

This is especially true of the later hymns of the Rig 
Veda, and of the hymns of the Atharva Veda, supposed to 
have been not much, if any, less ancient. It is in these 
that we begin to find those grand titles : Visva Karman, 
' the universal architect/ and Prajapati, ' lord of crea- 
tures ; ' but we notice that they are applied still to special 
deities : Indra, Savitr, Rudra, Soma, Vishnu, or Varuna. 
In the 1 21st hymn of the Rig Veda, for example, the deity 
is celebrated (under the name Hiranyagarbha) as { arisen 
in the beginning ; only lord of all ; upholder of heavens 
and earth ; giver of life and breath ; god of all gods, and 
the animating principle of their existence.* 

I need not follow this subject further. I confess I do 
not at all agree with the common explanations of the Hindu 
mythology, as published by Muir, Max Miiller, and other 
Sanscrit scholars. Their theories seem to me to have no 
system. I think it is because they have no basis. They 
have not yet struck the key-note. In this course of lectures 
I have been gradually preparing your minds for a view of 
the subject, which I think may explain most of the diffi- 
culties which Sanscrit mythologists confess that they en- 
counter. ' This is my tenth lecture. I have still one more 
to deliver. I have reserved the theme to which I have 
given most attention to the last. I do not wish to scare you 
with a deluge of unintelligible words. I think I can repay 
your patience with a solid addition to your knowledge. I 
think I can show you an order reigning over the apparent 
chaos of ideas respecting the gods in olden times. I think 
I can put into your hands the right key to the door, — the 
safe clue for the labyrinth. The ancient poets were not 
mad-men ; the old philosophers were not all fools. They 

* Sanscrit Texts, iv. 13 H. Muir, p. 344. 



292 THE FOUR TYPES OP [.LECT. 

could distinguish sense from nonsense as well as we, — ■ 
though not as vjell as we. Classical scholars have been 
tormented by the inconsistent and contradictory family- 
relations of the Greek and Roman gods, father, brother, 
and son, being mixed up together. Sanscrit scholars are 
equally at a loss to comprehend why Bramanas-pati should 
be called in one hymn of the Rig Veda ' the father of the 
gods/ * and in another, l the son of Tvashtr, lord of all/ f 
Now, I think that it is only in the theory of the develop- 
ment of the later monotheisms and polytheisms out of the 
older ancestral worships and fetich- worship of primeval 
times, that we can find our explanation of these and similar 
mythological absurdities. To the ancient bard, initiated in 
the Arkite mysteries, they were no absurdities. What was 
fetich to the vulgar crowd outside, was history and poetry to 
the priest within. And so it may become to us. But we must 
comprehend the symbols. Of these I will speak at large 
when next we meet, and you will permit me to devote an 
entire evening to them ; for they cover the whole ground 
of human life, and interpenetrate every department of na- 
tural history. 

For this evening I have but one more word to add. I 
have spoken of three types of religious ideas : 1. Ancestral 
worship ; 2. Fetich worship ; 3. Polytheism and Mono- 
theism. 

IY. The highest type of the religious idea is Pantheism. 
It is the philosophic idea of God. It is the idea which 
science takes of the divine. Science, you know, is the know- 
ledge of the logical understanding; not the instinctive 
sight of the pure reason — not the deep faith of the loving 
imagination. Science is essentially irreligious, that is, 
unworshipping. Science looks down upon things — not up 
to them. Science analyzes, dissects, discusses, all things; 
God among the rest : or tries to do so ; it is its vocation, 
its nature, its duty. Do not blame it. Do not feel a 
horror at it, as the Italians shuddered at good old Vasari, 
with his medical fez, loose gown, and scalpel. Yasari 
with his scalpel looked like a vampire hanging over that 
dead body. But there was no demoniac fury in the old 
man's eyes ; no — there was a holy zeal burning in them, to 

* Muir, p, 344. R. V. ii, 26. 3. t B» V. ii. 23. 17. 



X.] RELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 293 

discover the laws of the anatomy of the dead for the good 
of the living. Science is no vampire of the night, flap- 
ping its wings over our sleeping religion, soothing its 
slumbers, and sucking its blood. God forbid the thought. 
Every part of man must do its duty ; and science is the 
work of man's logical understanding. Now, the investiga- 
tion of God by man's understanding has always resulted in 
some theory of Pantheism. 

Whether philosophers took Fetichism as their stand- 
point, or whether they took Ancestor-worship as their 
starting-point, they arrived at Pantheism. The worship 
of the father on earth developes itself into the worship of 
the father in heaven. Then the attributes of the personal 
god become generalized, refined, distributed, dissipated, 
and identified with the universe. When ancient sages 
came to believe in the absolute goodness, justice, love, and 
wisdom of deity, or providence, they fell into that peace 
which needed nothing, feared nothing, and therefore wor- 
shipped nothing. Nothing to blame, nothing to praise; 
the perfect whole became one great divinity. It was so in 
Magadha and Benares; it is so in Concord and Boston. 

On the other hand, the worship of the fetich developed 
itself into the elemental worship of the ancients, and into 
the thunder- and war-providence worship of orthodox 
Christianity. If the progress of science has explained 
away the miracles, where is the miracle -mak er ? Dis- 
tributed throughout his universe. All nature becomes a 
miracle. ' In him we live and move and have our being/ 

But universal Pantheism is impossible. All the common 
instincts of man oppose his progress in that direction. 
Man also is a trinity : he is heart, imagination, under- 
standing, in one. His God must therefore always be per- 
sonal and anthropomorphic as well as infinite : personal — 
to be beloved; anthropomorphic — to be imagined; and 
infinite — to be confided in. The Incarnation of Jesus was 
a reaction of the liuman heart against the cold spaciousness 
of Pantheism. The Assumption of Jesus was a reaction of 
the imagination against the dark vagueness of Pantheism. 
So long as man feels himself a child, he will climb up upon 
the knees of the Father who is in heaven ; or nestle to the 
bosom of Abraham. So long as woman feels herself op- 
pressed and afflicted, she will idolize a well-defined divinity. 



294 THE POUR TYPES OF EELIGIOUS WORSHIP. 

Joy and sorrow make common cause against the approach 
of Pantheism. Youth and women — three quarters of the 
human race — are idolaters by natural necessity. Let then 
the progress of science — the deductions of the logical un- 
derstanding — clear away from men's eyes the errors of the 
past, and lead them into that liberty of spirit which is due 
to Christianity, c the liberty wherewith Christ made his 
people free/ — it will be none the less a fact, that ( the things 
of the Spirit are spiritually discerned. - ' There are things 
that science cannot grasp, some things that lie beyond the 
scope of logic ; and it will be as true in every age, as it 
was when the blessed Master took a little child and set him 
in the midst of them, that — ( many things are hidden from 
the wise and prudent which are revealed unto babes/ 



295 



LECTURE XI. 

ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 

We have discussed the development of the Religious 
Idea under its four types : Atavism, or the worship of 
parents; Fetichism, or the worship of magical powers in 
the objects of nature ; Theism and Polytheism, or the wor- 
ship of heavenly powers ; and Pantheism, or the philosophi- 
cal deification of the Cosmos or Perfect Universe. 

We ought, perhaps, now to take up the discussion of the 
generic and specific forms of ceremonial worship under 
which these four types of the Religious Idea have developed 
themselves in the history of the various races of mankind ; 
and show how the tropical black races, and the hyperborean 
stunted races, seem never to have had the ability to lift 
their spiritual life out of the bogs and swamps of Fetichism 
upon the firm land of Theism, but have been a prey in all 
ages to the cruelties of demon worship and the low trick- 
ery of Shamans or sorcerers; how the central white races 
alone have had, first, powers of imagination to devise sym- 
bols to represent abstract thoughts, and then powers of 
understanding to construct intellectual systems to free 
their souls from the terrors of nature, and at last to sub- 
ject the powers of the physical elements to scientific con- 
trol. 

But you are probably familiar enough with that train of 
thought to make its recapitulation unnecessary; and I 
willingly pass to a subject not so well understood, not at 
all elaborated in the books, in fact, hardly recognized by 
our new tribes of thinkers ; yet lying, I believe, at the 
bottom of all true knowledge of ancient history. 



/ 



296 ON AEKITB SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 

Let me claim, then, your attention this evening to what 
I must call, for want of a better name, the Arlrite Symbol- 
ism of the Ancients. 

Mycologists, like geologists, philologists, and other 
classes of savans, constitute a large and learned body in 
our day. Mythology has become one of the sciences. It 
has its schools also, and its schoolmaster ei, to use a German 
word greatly needed in English, although the new chan- 
cellor of the University of Edinburgh was not precisely the 
man to introduce it. Its professors have their theories, 
differing widely, we must confess; but they work for a 
common end, and that a noble one : the elucidation of the 
religious intellectual history of mankind. They are always 
busy deciphering the ancient inscriptions, restoring in idea 
the ancient monuments, harmonizing all the ancient fables, 
and analyzing all the records of old forms and modes of 
thought and feeling which have happily escaped destruction 
in the lapse of time. Every month some learnedly-elabor- 
ated memoir makes its appearance in the annals of one or 
other of the learned societies of Europe, especially in those 
of Dresden, Yienna, and Berlin. At last our own country 
has begun to take a part in this fascinating recreation. 
Germany is to have no longer a monopoly of the philosophy 
of religious history. The resume of known facts relating 
to all religions which Lydia Maria Child has given to us, 
would do honour to a European scholar. The coming of 
Kreutzer to New York, and SeufTarth to St Louis, furnished 
our thinkers with the same sort of stimulus as that which 
the coming of Max Muller to Oxford afforded the fellows 
of England. I do not mean to liken these three men to 
one another, or to draw comparisons between them and a 
host of other workers in this field of science — to Rawlinson, 
and Muir and Eenan and De Eougemont and Bunsen 
and Aufrecht and Panofka. On the contrary, the fact 
that these men are all different — represent different views, 
views in many respects irreconcilable, in many respects 
visionary, illogical, contracted, preposterous, self-destruc- 
tive, unworthy of true science, although, in many ways, 
throwing a flood of light upon the history of the past, — 
only shows that this science of Mythology is still in the 
process of self- organization. Let us work and wait. It 
will all come out clear and beautiful in its time. But as 



XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 297 

yet there is no reliable text-book, no infallible professor, of 
the science of Mythology. 

This science may be said to be in its third stage of 
growth. It began with the classical scholars of the Re- 
formation, Reuchlin, Erasmus, and the rest of the splendid 
list of the early prophets of the revival of literature, end- 
ing with Jacob Bryant and the so-called etymological 
mythologists of a hundred years ago. These men laid the 
foundation by collating from the Roman, Greek, and 
Hebrew writers all that remained about the gods and 
priestcrafts of antiquity. You find their labours recorded 
in the great dictionaries of JBayle, and Calmet, and Lem- 
priere, and Gesenius, and Anthon, and Smith. And a pre- 
cious mixture of fact and fable, sense and nonsense, it is. 
Mixed up, as it came at last to be, with the undigested 
learning of the Welsh and Irish mythologists, it settled 
into a mere fermenting muck-heap of absurdities, deserved- 
ly disgusting to the reasoning world ; and so it was covered 
over with contempt, and hid away. But some day it will 
be opened up again, and will prove a mine of wealth under 
a better system of cultivation. 

The next stage of the science opened with Young's and 
Champ olli on' s discoveries of the lost key to the reading of 
the Egyptian hieroglyphs; followed by the successful in- 
vestigations of Burnouf and Abel-Remusat and Pauthier 
and Lassen and Rawlinson and Wilson and Wilford, into 
the deciphering of the Assyrian, Indian, and Chinese litera- 
tures. This immensely enlarged the scope of the inquiry, 
explained the origin and meaning of many a Hebrew, 
Greek, and Roman mystery, and gave the first aspect of 
unity to the new science. 

The third stage of progress was inaugurated by the 
Brothers Grimm, followed by a procession of scholars, 
taking up the subject of the folkslore of Germany, Scandi- 
navia, Slavonia; working out the traditions of antiquity 
which still exist among the common people of Christendom, 
heathen worships which are practised in the nineteenth cen- 
tury in the bosom of the Christian Church, and bringing 
them into harmony or contrast with existing heathenisms 
in other regions of the globe, as these have been studied 
and described by hundreds of Catholic and Protestant 
missionaries at their respective stations. 



298 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

This will give some idea — vague but vast enough — of the 
amount of work in this science already done. But it will 
also suggest the state of affairs among its professors, and 
why discordant views are held by its highest authorities; I 
mean discordant systems — hostile theories of the origins and 
meanings of the different mythologies and ceremonials of 
history. Just at the present moment there seems to be a 
more concurrent sentiment among them ; but it is a decep- 
tive appearance. There is a lull in the storm of speculation, 
that is all. Everybody has turned to collecting facts. The 
same thing happened in geology a few years ago. The old 
controversies ceased ; speculation, or theorizing on a large 
scale, was abandoned for the moment ; geologists employed 
their time in observation, and refused controversy. But 
this could not last long, and did not last long. Hypothesis 
is king of science. The soul, like an artist, walks back- 
ward as far as possible from the canvas to see how the 
general effect of the picture is coming out, and then re- 
tarns to supply deficiencies in the details, or correct the 
errors of the plan. 

We may be sure that all that has ever been thought 
out carefully by the old mythologists will be taken up 
and re-incorporated with the generalizations of new men. 
Jacob Bryant had his day and is forgotten : — people say 
it. No ! Jacob Bryant is yet to have his day. Some man 
of larger culture will yet do for this English mystagogue, 
what Eawlinson has done for Herodotus ; what Birch and 
Hincks and Marie tte are doing for Manetho. It is in the 
Arkism of Bryant and Harcourt that we are to find the so- 
lution of most of those still unexplained anomalies which 
prevent the mythological studies of our day from taking 
equal rank with those of the other and more so-called 
physical sciences. 

' I comprehend well/ writes one of our greatest mytho- 
logists, 'the principle of the Arian religion, a religion 
entirely of poetry, a profound naturalism, touching, full of 
a high morality ; I think I comprehend well the principle 
of the religion of the Shemitic nomades, such as the Book 
of Job presents us with, such as the Mussulman of Arab 
race still practises in our day; I even comprehend, to a 
certain point, those bizarre worships of Babylon and 
Syria, worships not Shemitic, and still less Arian, answer- 



XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 299 

ing to sensations of an order apart from these ; but the 
primary idea of the Egyptian religion escapes me/* 

If such a confession can be made by Eenan what must 
be the condition of that department of modern science of 
which he is one of the acknowledged leaders ? ISTot to 
comprehend the primary idea of the Egyptian religion is 
not to comprehend anything of the genius,, anything of the 
ceremonial, anything of the architecture, anything of the 
intellectual literature of primeval antiquity. Egyptian 
history goes back farther than all others. The Egyptian 
ideas of religion open to us the doors of all spiritual in- 
quiry. 

Our first business then is to obtain, in any way open to 
us, by an examination of its monuments, some clue to the 
central principle of the most ancient of the religious 
systems of Egypt, some notion of that ' primary idea ? to 
which M. Renan alludes. For it is very evident that new 
and different notions were intruded as dynasty after dy- 
nasty arose, until system was piled upon and interfused 
with system to the prejudice, though not to the entire sup- 
pression or extinction, of the earliest ideas. The monu- 
ments of the Middle Empire (11—17 dynasties) and of the 
Classic Empire (18 — 21 dynasties) are covered with a 
literature from which our Egyptologists have constructed 
the so-called Egyptian Pantheon, with the Libyan Ammon 
for its Jupiter, and a long train of gods and goddesses, 
resembling those of Greece and Rome. At the commence- 
ment of the Middle Empire Osiris and his sister Isis first 
appear. Our first question- then must be : Were these 
two deities the earliest gods of the Egyptians, and were 
they recognized and worshipped previously to their ap- 
pearance upon the monuments of the eleventh dynasty ? 
To obtain any right to answer this difficult question we 
must go back to the much earlier times of the ancient em- 
pire and see what images of a supernatural, mythological, 
or ideal kind existed then, and what probable meaning 
they can be made to bear. 

In a former lecture I have noticed the extraordinary 
fact that the most ancient monuments of Egypt show no 
evident traces of religion; and I may add in passing, 

* Kenan, Revue des Deux Mondes, June, 1865, p. 682. 



300 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

Desor's assertion, that, up to the last discoveries in the 
lake- dwellings of Switzerland, ' neither an idol nor any- 
thing from which any custom of worship may be inferred 
has as yet been found, unless certain objects of baked 
earth called moonsichles may be by some regarded as re- 
ligious emblems. - ' (See Appendix to p. 310.) 

But there is one Egyptian figure of great antiquity and 
interest, that of the dog Anubis, the watch-dog of the 
tomb; the only image that can even lay a claim to the 
name of a divinity. The cognomen of ' a god ' is no doubt 
in this instance a misnomer; we are doubtless dealing 
with a symbol. But we must bear in mind the name, 
Anubis, or — as it is written on the monuments of the old 
empire, with the figure, not of a dog, but of a jackal, with 
cocked ears, and tail erect ANUP,* — for we shall have oc- 
casion to refer to it hereafter. I will only say in passing, 
now, that if the jackal was in any sense or degree an ob- 
ject of religious reverence to the earliest Egyptians, it 
must have been as a fetich, out of fear, as the wolf and fox 
became objects of superstitious terror to other races of 
mankind, because it feasted on the bodies of the dead.f 
The dog alone could have inspired any such cordial respect 
as would justify the Egyptian artists in making Anubis 
the guardian of the tomb. It must however be borne in 
mind that his name in old Egyptian was not ANTJB but 
SAB, the same word which was employed to express craft 
and cunning, and also a magician. 

In spite however of this sacred silence of the earliest 
monuments the ancient Egyptians must have had some re- 
ligious ideas besides the mere anticipation of an eternal 

* Bunsen's Egypt, vol. i. p. 492, p. 515 ; Ideographs, Nos. 259 to 264; 
also plate vi.27- See p. 321, below, and Appendix to p. 300. 

f The wolf and fox in other countries take the place of the jackal in 
the superstitions of the people, as prowlers in the night, evil spirits of 
darkness. De Rougemont (Peuple Primitif, Geneva, 1855, i. p. 339) 
shows how the wolf was an emblem of night. Apollo XvKoyivrjg, ' son of 
the she-wolf, 5 Latona, Night, is himself called the ' Wolf-slayer.' The 
Scandinavians say that two wolves perpetually pursue the sun and moon, 
and when they catch them there happens an eclipse. The wolf, Fenris, 
now chained (like the Satan of the Apocalypse), will one day break loose 
and swallow Odin and his universe. Fenris, is chaos or darkness, and his 
father Loki, is the evil deity. The Japanese consider the fox (WOLF = 
VJTLPes = Fa\w7T££) an incarnation of the Genius of Evil. The dog, on 
the other hand, is the priest of light. 



XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 301 

pliant om-life within the tomb. We know,, for instance, 
that the great Sphinx was in existence at the very opening 
of Egyptian history, and was an object of such veneration 
that the builder of the great pyramid, Cheops, the second 
king of the 4th dynasty, records his restoration of it with 
masonry ; * and I have already spoken of the temple which 
M. Mariette found close beside it, as well as of the little 
figures in a well within its walls bearing the name of 
Chephren, the builder of the second pyramid. Now the 
great Sphinx stands all alone. f It was once an isolated 
outcrop of rock, rising from the inundated valley of the 
Nile. Some monarch, of a dynasty still older than the 
fourth, must have cut this island-rock (177 feet long by 
65 feet high) into the form of a crouching lion, with a 
human head, coifed in that strange cap, with broad flap- 
ping ears, and long breast -lappets, which became the 
standard of taste in Egypt for 5000 years. 

If we could get at the truth it would probably turn out, 
that the great Sphinx of Egypt was not a deity originally, 
but a symbol. The lotus bunches on the facades of the 
old tombs might possibly have been an accidental pictorial 
ornament. The broad flaring cornice of the temple might 
possibly have been an unconscious effort of the taste to 
beautify the awkward crest-line of a wall against the sky. 
But a rock-carved lion with a human head must have 
meant something; must have had an intellectual mean- 
ing ; in mythological language, must have been a religious 
symbol. J 

But if the Sphinx had a designed and intelligible mytho- 
logical meaning, then we may go back to the lily-mould- 
ings and to the flaring cornice, and conclude that they also 
were probably religious symbols. To what system of 
symbolism then could they have belonged ? What could 
have been the religious ideas of a day when there were no 
idols to worship, no ceremonial but the simplest burial 
service, no priesthood but that of the father of the family ? 
Especially must we ask, what system of religious symbolism 

* Renan says of this inscription found by Mariette, and now at Boulak, 
that it fs so bizarre as to raise some doubts, p. 676 of his Revue. 

f Picture of it in frontispiece of Bunsen's Egypt. See Appendix. 

X Bunsen, Ideograph (p. 513), 277, sphinx, victory; a/cr, sphinx; nb 
lord. D. &c. [See his Nos, 273 to 276.] See Appendix. 



302 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

will include such heterogeneous elements as a sphinx,, a 
group of lilies, and a cornice ? 

If we only knew from what direction the oldest inhabit- 
ants entered the valley of the Nile, — whether from India, 
or from Syria, or from Abyssinia and Central Africa, — we 
should have perhaps a more convenient starting-point for 
our investigation. But as the origin of the earliest Egyp- 
tian people is still an undetermined point, we must take 
the widest glance around the ancient world to see if we 
can find, in countries possibly connected with Egypt at 
the dawn of history, any mythological objects similar to 
these* 

Pococke has tried to prove that Egypt was first settled 
from India. Let us then look in India for the lily, the 
cornice, and the sphinx, or for some objects that resemble 
them. The Egyptian lily is no longer seen upon the 
waters of the Nile ; but it grows all over India, and is the 
sacred flower of Vishnu and of Brahma. The sphinx is no 
uncommon sight upon the temples of India. The Egyptian 
cornice is not seen in India because its stiff and regular 
shape was only suited to the cold and mathematical pylon 
which it covered ; but its analogue exists, as I have shown 
in a former lecture, in the uppermost bulging story of the 
Hindu pagoda and the Tibetan temple. To these I may 
also add another instance, the Urasus, or hooded- serpent, 
the sign of royalty which you are so familiar with, as seen 
upon the forehead of all the Egyptian kings, and which 
seems to be the cobra of India. f 

There was then undoubtedly an early connection of re- 
ligious ideas between these two regions, separated only by 
a moderate length of sea-coast. But there are also such 
diversities observable between the shapes above alluded to 
that we are led to suspect, and almost to believe, that two 
indigenous populations of entirely different stirpal origin, 
possessed indeed a common symbolism, but developed it 
in two quite independent lines. 

Our question is : What was there in common to the re- 
ligious symbolism of India and Egypt, — including of course 
in the field of our inquiry the intermediate and dependent 
regions of Persia, Babylonia, and Syria, as well ? Ignoring 

* See Appendix to page 302. t See Appendix to p. 340. 



XI.] 02T AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 303 

for tlie moment all the elaborated mythologies of later 
times, what simple system of worship can we discern per- 
vading the earliest monumental relics of that central his- 
toric zone ? 

I know of but one answer to this question. It is the 
answer of the Hebrew Scriptures, of the Talmuds, of the 
Cabbalists, of the Freemasons, of Jacob Bryant, Harcourt, 
Davis, and Faber :— The system of Arkite symbolism ; the 
religious representation of the ark of Noah, the water 
on which it floated, the mountain on which it rested, and 
the man whom it preserved. Whatever may have been the 
nature of the event, wherever its scene may have been 
laid, at whatever date it may have happened — all matters 
which seem beyond the reach of our discovery, — surely> 
this Diluvium, — distorted records of which abide among 
all nations, in the New World * as well as in the Old — 
this Diluvium, so scoffed at by sceptics, denied by geology, 
and contemptuously ignored by all the present schools of 
philologists and archaeologists, — this Deluge of Noah could 
alone have furnished to the most Ancient Egypt its sym- 
bolic lily, its temple cornice, and its Sphinx ; as it after- 
wards furnished to the Middle Empire a numerous and 
complicated pantheon. 

It may be asserted, I mean to say, that all mythologies f 
issued from the ark. History itself begins with the word. Ev 
apyj] — c in the beginning ■ — ( God created the heavens and 
the earth/ says the translation of the Seventy. ARChaios 
is the classical Greek word for ancient. Archaeologists 
get the very name of their science from the ark which it 
has grown the fashion among them to sink.f 

The Greeks called ARGos their most ancient city ; and 
the mythological prototype of all sea-going ships was the 
AXtGo, They considered the gods of ARCadia the most 
ancient, as they were certainly the most primitively simple 
deities of the classic world. They called their most ancient 
and sacred religious ceremonies ORGs (opyia) ; from which 
the Christians got their opprobrious term Orgies for all 
sorts of heathen ceremonies, especially when they were 

* See especially Pacific It. R. Surveys, vol. iii. 3rd part ; Wipple, p. 40. 

f Architecture received its name from the same source, as I have already 
explained. The Latins said TStRiQcere, as we still say ER<?C/, when we 
wish to speak of building on a grand scale. (See Appendix to p. 303.) 



304 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

practised in the dark and secrecy. A curious relic of the 
ancient root is preserved in one of the African negro 
languages, the Bari, where we have the word GROT, mean- 
ing to be ashamed. The Roman word for any mystery was 
ARCanum— for any religious teaching QUACulum — that is, 
an Arkite thing, knowledge shut up and sealed from jlublic 
view.* 

The ancient Phrygian name for their first man or king 
was Arki&ev&is, which still survives in the Armenian word 
Ark&j, and its equivalent the Latin m/ius, or rex, a king ; f 
in modern days it carries the same meaning even into the 
most distant regions of the earth ; for throughout the whole 
Pacific Ocean the word ARIK-^ means a chief, and in New 
Zealand, a priest , or representative of God. % 

Understand me, we are not now busying ourselves with 
the true etymology of the word ark. I am simply showing 
you that it was a word used in ancient times to represent 
the beginning of things, antiquity, religion, and religious 
mysteries ; and that, preparatory to its application to the 
most ancient and venerable object of religious art in Egypt, 
the Great Sphinx. For although the common name of a 
sphinx in the Egyptian language was neb, or 'lord/ the 
proper and personal name of the Great Sphinx in the most 
ancient times seems to have been ARK, the ark. All other 
sphinxes afterwards sculptured to represent guards of the 
temples, and placed in two rows between which the pro- 
cessions of priests passed to the shrine, were copies of the 
Great Sphinx, and shared its names and honours. 

As reasonable people what are we to think of these coin- 
cidences ? Are we not shut up without escape to the con- 
clusion that the primeval symbolism of the historic, literary, 
or mythological races of mankind, took form in the endeavour 
to perpetuate the memory of some diluvial catastrophe ? and 
that its elements were of the simplest kind, — pictures and 
models of the ark, of the mountain, of the water ; — a trinity 
of objects, representing the starting-point of history, and 

* The old Egyptian word ARK signifies upon the monuments (says 
Bunsen) conclusion, shutting up. And in Coptic or later vulgar Egyptian, 
to guard. Compare Latin Arceo, I shut up, or prohibit. 

t The prochaldean word for c a king' is SkIP, says Talbot, Jour. R. 
Asi. Soc., p. 446, vol. xx. 

X See Lee and Hale. 



XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 305 

itself the starting-point of all mythology, — the first type of 
all those solemn ceremonials on which the poet and the 
priest, those intellectual aristocrats of early ages, organized 
society, and laid a basis for that culture out of which has 
sprung, like the lilies from the inundations of the Ganges 
and the Nile, all arts, philosophies, and worships that have 
awed and charmed and elevated man. 

You will feel as I do, how impossible it is, if this idea be 
true, to enter largely into the details of its elucidation. I 
must confine myself to special points. How does the 
Arkite theory afford us any explanation of the Sphinx, — that 
wonderful object of the old Egyptian's reverence, crouch- 
ing in front of the great pyramid, alone in its silent majesty, 
before the other pyramids were built, the oldest god of 
Egypt, — before the Egyptians knew there was a God ? I 
have already said it was no god ; it was a symbol only. In 
after-ages indeed it became a god, and was called, so the 
Greek informs us, Armachis. Its personal hieroglyphic 
name which the Greeks thus perverted, was horem-hou* 
( the Great Hou ; 3 and some have brought this name Hou 
into etymological identity with the awful name of the 
Hebrew Deity, Ihoua, or Jehovah. At all events the cele- 
brated sacred city of Egypt, Diospolis, the city of gods, is 
called by the Arabs to this day by the same name, Hou. 

Let us compare the sphinxes of Egypt with those of 
other and more eastern lands ; and then connect with these 
the chimeras, griffins, hydras, centaurs, tritons, hippo- 
camps, hyppogriffs, and dragons of the classical and still 
more modern times. In all cases we will find that the 
attempt was made to combine the three essential elements 
of the Arkite symbolism in one object. The head of a 
woman with the body of a lion ; or, the head of a man with 
the body of a bull; or, the head of a goat with the body 
of a lion and the tail of a serpent ; or, the head and body 
of a man with the body of a horse, and the fins and tail of 
a fish. In all cases the first element represented the ark 
upon the mountain, or the Noah in place of the ark ; the 
second element the mountain itself; and the third element 
the diluvial flood. The water was symbolized either by 
the lion's mane and tail ; or, by the serpent as a tail ; or, 

Renan, Revue, p. 676. But Fowler thinks that hu is thu, the same 
God (Jour. G., 4, 17). 

20 



306 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 

in the case of the Ninevite sculptures, by a covering of 
scales on the body of the bull ; or, by the feathers of eagles' 
wings, as in the Hebrew cherubim, a type intermediate 
between the' sphinx of Mesopotamia and the sphinx of 
Egypt. In Persia the single image was subdivided; and 
the separated elements formed a group of statuary. Mi- 
thras stabbing the bull which had a lion's mane ; or, lions 
with diluvial manes flying upon the shoulders of the moun- 
tain bull. In such cases the ark was represented by the 
crescent horns of the bull. In the Egyptian type of 
sphinx the head-dress, flowing down over the back and 
breast like the mane of a lion, represented the water ; and 
the female head represented Isis, the genius of the ark, the 
Venus floating on the sea, the Maia, virgin mother of 
Vishnu. 

A hundred pages might be filled with illustrations of 
that ingenuity of fancy, with which this symbolism was 
brought to perfection by its inventors ; and varied by the 
multifarious priesthoods, full of schisms and heresies, which 
followed each other like successive forests on that virgin 
soil. These few first elements of mythology have been 
played upon by all mythologists ; as the seven musical 
notes of the diatonic scale have furnished to musicians the 
stuff of all their compositions ; from the rudest Gregorian 
chant up to the bewildering fugues of Bach, and the 
splendid combinations of melody and harmony in the Don 
Giovanni and the Fidelio. The history of music has been 
in fact the counterpart of the history of symbolism ; and 
been interwoven with it from the earliest times. 

The score with its three cleffs* (which represent the 
triple water-line of the Egyptian monuments) embodies 
the idea of the Arkite trinity. The roar of the Bass around 
the Treble, with the melody in Alto, is the roar of the sea 
around the Tor-Baal ; and it was produced in ancient days 
by the repetition of single words by the immense crowd 
around the temple. I have heard the monotonous re- 
sponses of the Ora pro nobis ! pulsating thus by the hour 
through the solemn gloom of the great Cathedral at 
Nantes, with a falling and then rising and then falling 
inflexion, like the periodical dash of the surge of the sea 

* Compare the sistrum with its 3 rods (sometimes 4). 



XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 307 

upon the "beach. If you will but recall the older Italian 
mass music, you will notice how it sustains itself nearly 
level for* long distances, but with a perpetually upward 
and downward motion, confined within the limits of three 
or four notes, as if the waving surface of water had been 
actually before the composer's eyes.* 

It is surprising how porous the stratification of human 
history has been, letting down, through all the generations, 
the percolating streams of tradition ; each age passing on- 
ward to its successor what it received of its predecessor, 
with additions of its own. Thus are we born heirs to the 
wealth of all the past. 

In Wales the traveller sees around him the accumulated 
work of many centuries, stone bridges, stone roads, stone 
houses, stone barns; stone walls of immense height and 
infinite in number, cover all the country ; and within-doors 
the furniture and utensils are heirlooms from forgotten an- 
cestors. So it is with the world's symbolism. The waters 
of tradition have been always gathering up the salt and oil 
from every stratum of history, to fill with them those re- 
servoirs which we call Church and State and Family. 

From State life, Church life, and Family life, you may 
select a thousand specimens of the traditions of the most 
remote past. I need nothing more than the commonest 
English forms of speech, the nursery words which you are 
teaching to your babies as they grow, in order to elucidate 
the meaning of those primeval symbols of religious faith 
which still stand, petrified, august, unhonoured, and mis- 
understood, as if they had at last fallen asleep from very 
weariness of all that they have passed through and seen 
done beneath them on the borders of the Nile. 

The sphinx I have already explained, and the cornice 
moulding also, in a former lecture. The lily emblem is 
the floating cradle of Vishnu. f Flowers are the most 
beautiful mysteries of the earth-life. Was the eye of 
man ever indifferent to the shooting bud, the unfolding 
calyx, the flying pollen, and the swelling seed ? We may 
well ask when the wheat and the apple, the poppy and the 
walnut (Ju-glans, the nut of Jove J ), were tamed and cul- 
tivated — reclaimed from their poor and savage meagreness 

* See Appendix A to p. 307. f Idem, B. J Desor. 



308 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

to be the comfort of the civilized man and the delight of 
the men of luxury and taste. Agriculture and horticulture 
are worships of the powers of nature, cultus maximS matris. 
How closely must the earlier thinkers of mankind have 
watched all these phenomena of seed-time and harvest ! 
How the primeval fancy must have revelled in this wealth 
of symbolism ! It was the founder of free-masonry that 
' knew all the trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the 
hyssop that groweth on the wall/ It was in the convent 
garden that flowers grew doubly beautiful, and choice 
flavours began to exhale from every fruit. It was to the 
dreaming priest that the pomegranate looked a colony of 
living individuals, like his own fraternity ; that the fir-cone 
seemed an Athos full of mimic anchorites ; that the nymphcea 
was an ark of safety floating over the abyss, a tliebah with 
its family of Noachides ; that the nut (in German nuss) was 
a z;auj or little ship, in which the infant deity lay hidden until 
his time was come. No wonder, then, that in Egypt — the 
country of floods, of inundations par excellence — the water- 
lily should become a prime and perpetual symbol of the 
mysteries both of death and resurrection, and take pre- 
cedency of all those vegetable symbolisms which multi- 
plied themselves in course of time according to the pro- 
gress of intelligence and the appearance of successive new 
mythologies. 




Fig. 15. .ANY, repeated on the Ark of Osiris 



I must pass on to mention other instances of the embodi- 
ment of the Arkite sphinx-trinity symbol in other and 
different forms. And the first and most important one of 
all, you see it here repeated three times (see Fig. 15) on a 
group of hieroglyphs on the side of the ark of Osiris : at 
the beginning, in the centre, and at the end of the group. 
You recognize it as the sign of divinity which all the 
Egyptian gods carry in the hand, and which is also fre- 
quently seen in the hands of the images of priests (Fig. 16,k.) 



XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 309 

Its form is that of a ring surmounting a crux ansata, or head- 
less cross j its name, under the old empire, was anx ; * and 
its meaning, life. But why did it mean life ? or rather 
why did it mean immortal life, divine life, life beyond 
death, the life of the gods, i. e. of the deified ancestors ? 
No answer to this question is given in the books. 

Now if we apply the Arkite key to it we obtain an imme- 
diate intelligible answer to this question : the ring is the 
mundane egg or ship ; the cross line is the surface of the 
waters; and the stem represents the mountain. If the 
cross pieces of the symbol were always simply made up of 
straight lines there still might be some lurking doubt about 
the meaning of the stem. But the Egyptian priests were care- 
ful to furnish a commentary on it by making this stem in 
many cases in the form of a pyramid or triangle ; and a 

Fig. 16. 

35 b. Kou, Thou. Anchor 12. mahr slick ^tm k. 

tradition of this form is still preserved in the triangular 
shape of the arms of the Maltese cross. You may see the 
symbol in its perfect condition repeated, with the lily and 
the scarabaeus, on this amulet or seal, found in one of the 
graves of the ancient cemetery of Tharras — the Thebes of 
the island of Sardinia (Fig. 17). It has been discovered 

* Bunsen, Eg. Voc, p. 456, No. 62. Bunsen has not the anx in his 
phonetic alphabet. In his determinatives he has No. 144 (Fig. 16), 
mirror, ma-hr ; In-lir, mirror. No. 128, s'ha (Fig. 16), to encase; sna, 
to turn away, knee. No. 127 (Fig. 16), seal, ytm^ to shut; snnu, to en- 
close. No. 12 (Fig. 16), names of gods (living gods) ; ' same holding 
symbol of life.' (No. 11, same (without symbol of life), names of men.) 
In his Ideographs he has 408, 338, 288, 246, gazelle with it hanging from 
his neck, {Ska, ska, to collect, a crowd ;) 239, 200, 199, 198, goddesses 
holding it ; 174, 173, 164, 162, 154, 146, 141, 137, 135, 131, 116, 72, God 
holding ; 35 (Fig. 16) is the ' House Good ' on the tombs, the tamboura 
in the opened quadrangle. We are reminded of the shape of our anchor 
(Fig. 16), as if it had an etymology of aneh-Hor, the anx °f Horus. I am 
also reminded of that beautiful symbol which stands over the gateway 
leading up to the Carthusian monastery, the Grande Chartreuse, a globe 
with a cross over it and the fine motto : — Stat crux dum volvitur orbis. 
(Fig. 16. b.) 



310 



ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 



[lect. 





Fig. 17. Amulet 
found at Tharras 
in Sardinia. 



among the amulets of the Bronze age,* in the palafittes or 
lake dwellings of Switzerland. 
Figure 18 is from the last 
edition of Professor Besoms 
Pfahlbauten des Neuenburger 
Sees, p. 72, and is extremely 
interesting and important for 
our subject, because the water- 
symbol is here not the hori- 
zontal line of a Crux ansata, 
but a zig-zag ornamentation 
across the face of the moun- Fi 18 y Gr 
tain pyramid; while the sculp- Bronze amulet 

turing of the edges of the found in lake 
, & , 1 -S Neufchatel. 

truncated pyramid very ex- 
actly reproduces the side mouldings of the later Egyptian 
propylaea. But we do not. really need this visible elucida- 
tion of the symbolic form of the anx* The obelisk is as 
much, and within eleven dynasties as ancient, a hieroglyph 
of the Ararat as is the pyramid. 

But the position of the symbol is of some importance to 
the explanation, and it is therefore very interesting to 
remark that in all cases the ' sign of life ' is kept carefully 
in one invariable position ; that is, ring uppermost ; or, in 
other words, all standing figures hold it by the ring down- 
wards, but all sitting figures by the stem up wards, f Of 
course its whole meaning would be lost by turning it stem 
up and ring down. J Being a symbol of the deluge, it repre- 
sented life destroyed and re-secured ; it represented the 
passage of man through the grand catastrophe ; it repre- 
sented death and burial and resurrection ; it represented 
the renewal of life upon the planet to the race of men ; it 
represented the conversion of the Noachidse from common 
men into immortal gods. Do you now feel the force of its 

* See Appendix to pages 309, 310. 

t I remember but one exception to this rule, viz. when gods or priests 
present the sign of life (either alone, or combined with the tarn and the tet) 
to the lips of the king, or of a defunct person. This occurs repeatedly on 
the walls of the model temple in the Champs de Mars, Exposition of 1867. 
See Appendix B to page 308. 

J "And yet the Chinese Kou (fig. 16) = ancient, Pauthier's Pamphlet, 
p. 58 ; and Thou (fig. 16), earth, terra (p. 59), seems to upset it. "Yet it 
is the tamboura of Egypt (fig. 16, No. 35), meaning music and goodness. 






XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 311 

triple appearance on the face of this sacred ark, carried by 
priests, and surmounted by the symbolic vase, from which 
issues the ram's head of the first man, Ammon, the god of 
gods in the Egyptian Pantheon ? * 

Before passing to other illustrations, I must beg you to 
let your attention be arrested by a coincidence in this same 
figure. The combination of the ship and water symbols in 
the ring and cross bar of the an\, as represented three 
times on the side of the ark, is repeated in the globe and 
outspread waving ram's horns above it. It is a common 
combination on the monuments. It explains also the 
mysterious winged globe which so commonly occupies a 
central position on the cornice of Egyptian buildings, 
especially upon the lintel of the door [toe] . It explains 
also the less ancient and more elaborate similar object 
visible on so many Mesopotamian and Persian monuments, 
the flying Mithras sitting in a ring, and upon a carpet, 
while his robes, spread out beneath it in a triangular or 
pyramidal form, represent the Ararat. In process of time 
the upward tendencies of human thought towards abstract 
conceptions and philosophical speculation converted the 
Arkite ring into a globe, which in its turn became the 
mundane egg enveloped by a serpent, which still later took, 
in one direction, the Bacchic form of the pine-apple on the 
summit of the Thyrsus [toe] bound round with fillets of 
white wool (to represent the water), — and in the other 
direction the Christian form of St John's communion cup, 
from which the serpent drinks. As Spencer sings of 
Faith :— 

' She was arrayed all in lylie white, 
And in her right hand bore a cup of gold 
With wine and water filled up to the height, 
In which a serpent did himself enfold, 
That horror made to all that did behold, 
But she no whit did change her constant mood/ &c. 

But we must not follow the symbol through its innu- 
merable transformations to so low a date, or we shall lose 
ourselves in a forest of details. Let us return to the study 

* The figure 15 has been very badly drawn, from memory, the author 
having no access to the original at the time of going to press. It ex- 
presses therefore only the general idea. The Ram's head ought to have 
been drawn issuing from a jar or vase. 



312 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

of it in its original and simplest shape. Or rather let us 
confine ourselves now to its cross only, and neglect the 
ring. The Christian symbol of faith, the cross, was only 
an adaptation to the events of the death of Christ, of the 
ancient and almost universally recognized symbol of death 
and immortality, ( the sacred TAU7 It was recognized from 
almost the earliest dawn of the history of the classic world 
as a sign of life redeemed.* Its adoption by brutal and 

* M. G. de Mortillet has published in 1866 an 8vo volume of 183 
pages, 117 figures in the text, entitled Le Signe de la Croix avant le 
Christianisme. 

He was led to the study of this subject by the common opinion that 
the builders of the Celtic monuments had no religious notions because no 
idols have ever been discovered in the dolmens. He has collected in this 
book the proofs of the universal or common occurrence, on these monu- 
ments of the bronze epoch, and of the first epoch of iron, of three prin- 
cipal symbols, recognizable under a multitude of variations : the circle ; 
the pyramid ; and the cross. - 

The circle, representing eternity, is still placed, under the name of 
nimbus, around the heads of Christian saints. The triangle, representing 
the Trinity, is almost always placed by Catholic painters upon the head of 
God. The cross represents redemption. 

On the Celtic monuments, he says, the circle is usually simple, with a 
dot in its centre ; but sometimes there exist concentric circles, up to 
seven. 

The triangle is usually composed of a series of parallel straight lines 
cut obliquely by two other bounding lines. Sometimes the parallel lines 
are horizontal or vertical. Sometimes the pyramid is built up of chevrons 
containing one another, or, in other words, a series of isosceles triangles, 
inside of one another, all cut off by a base line. Sometimes two asso- 
ciated triangles compose a six-pointed star. [See p. 34, above.] 

The cross is still more varied, made either with points, dots, or little 
holes, or with straight lines. Sometimes the ends of the cross pieces are 
turned aside at a right angle. Sometimes a dot or a circle is in the centre 
of the cross ; or circles are at its ends ; or between its arms ; or a circle 
envelopes the cross ; or is cut by its arms. Sometimes the cross is 
formed by four groups of semicircles, &c, &c. 

This combination of circle and cross used at places of sepulture is of a 
religious importance, and has invited M. Mortillet's special study. He 
finds its use far anterior to Christianity. The worship of the cross, ex- 
tensively spread through Gaul before the Roman conquest, existed in 
Emilia during the age of bronze. Its most complete exhibition is in the 
sepultures of Golaseeca. It seems to have been a worship of such a 
peculiar nature as to exclude the worship of idols, and that with such 
severity as to forbid even the representation of living objects. In pro- 
portion as these representations make their appearance, the cross becomes 
more rare, and finally disappears. (Materiaux pour l'histoire, &c, Sept., 
1866. Page 503.) 

The discoveries in the catacombs of Rome put quite a different aspect 



XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 313 

superstitious nations like the Bomans, as a punishment , can 
only be accounted for on mythological grounds, and by 
reference to the malign influence of a degenerate and cruel 
priestcraft. All tortures were symbolically contrived in 
those dark ages. Is it not, alas, in our own days that the 
Tabor of the divine transfiguration has been parodied by 
the Tyburn of criminal expiation ? Is not the Tabernacle 
with its Holy of Holies still insulted in the Christian world 
by Taverns* of drunkenness and vice ? Is not even the 
splendid apostrophe of EzekieFs vision made to stand in 
the pillory as an illustration of the meeting of the extremes 
of the sublime and the ridiculous, when the mother, in the 
nursery, sings to the baby in her lap the patty-cake song, 
bidding the baker-man to * Pick it, and cross it, and mark 
it with T ? ' — c And Jehovah spake to the man clad in linen, 
saying : Go through the midst of the city, even Jerusalem, 
and stamp T upon the foreheads of the men who sigh and 
cry for all the evil that is doing in their midst/ The 
expression in the original Hebrew is v'hithuitha tav } 
(ifi pVpty ; literally, cause TaV to be taved upon them. So 
completely had the sacred letter become a mark of holi- 
ness, that a verb had been constructed out of it ; to tav a 
thing, meant to stamp it with a tav ]-). And we have 
retained the very word in our own modern language, only 
improving upon it and intensifying it by the prefix s, 
signifying holy. Our word s-TAMp is with this addition its 
exact equivalent; and the German s-tem-pel is a still 
further enlarged and enforced form. 

When fathers eat of sour grapes, the children's teeth are 
always set on edge. Words never die. A symbolism, 
once established, can no more perish than an element in 

upon this symbol of the cross. A friend has informed me that he saw in 
the catacomb of St Sebastian at least a dozen figures of the cross, and in 
every instance it was in the shape of the letter T ; but one arm of the 
cross bar (at the right hand of the sufferer, the left of the spectator) was 
always longer than the other, and had always a square tablet of the 
accusation affixed to it at its end. 

* When K replaces T, as in all that series of words which may be most 
strictly called Cabalistic, then the derivatives change their initials also. 
When toe, becomes cab, and tatjb, becomes caer, then the English 
Tavern becomes the Prench Cabaret. Bar-bar-ity, tor-ture, and m-carcer- 
ation (from Latin career, a prison), are related to each other in precisely 
this sense. 



314 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

nature. Times change. Ages follow each other in solemn 
procession, like files of kings and priests along an avenue of 
sphinxes, each contributing its fatal riddle to the ceremony. 
Worships are donned and doffed, like priestly vestments, 
by the great religious spirit of mankind. Temples arise 
and draw in treasures like a man, and then lie down again, 
and die, stripped like dead bodies for the dust. All those 
things which seem to be real, prove themselves to be per- 
ishable and ephemeral like clouds. But words ! those airy 
nothings ! those birds of paradise, glancing across the air 
and sunshine of the soul ! those clouds of ever-changing 
shapes, but ever of one substance; self-producing and 
self-healing, when the winds arise to dash them into frag- 
ments ! Words never perish. They are the true waters of 
life : the world has never done with them. They rise for 
ever from the seas of soul, float, and appear around the 
mountain-tops of history, descend in branching languages, 
and yield man drink and plenty and intellectual commerce, 
and never-ending luxury. A word can never die. It may 
be changed ; changed in the twinkling of an eye ; caught 
up from its original gross meaning into a heaven of poetry, 
to sit with symbols in a realm of glorious imagination; 
but it must live for ever. Words breed like creatures. 
Bach begets its like — with a difference; but the family 
resemblance lasts. The oldest word man ever spoke is 
spoken, with its old meaning, somewhere upon earth to- 
day. 

Words, once invented by the poet, become D'HITj 
taboes — mountain-tops on which humanity erects its 
temples. In these shrines the deities of thought reside. 
The Hebrew language knew no difference between a word 
(dabar) and the tabernacle of the Lord of Hosts (debir). 
The Romans could not well distinguish between a denom- 
ination (nomen) and a deity (numen) . For a self-preserving, 
propagating force lies in each word ; as a specific genius 
conceals itself and works in every kind of animal and plant, 
throughout a thousand generations, against all the oppos- 
ing principles of nature, endowing it with a sort of gener- 
ous and special immortality. 

To prove what I have said, I shall devote the principal 
portion of the rest of this lecture to the tracing of such a 
word from its earliest appearance in Egyptian history down 



XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 315 

to our own times. I might, perhaps, have selected some 
other one equally persistent and significant to better pur- 
pose. I shall have, perhaps, difficulty in keeping it clear 
of its symbolical entanglements with others. But although 
I must sometimes allude to such side connections, I shall 
try to draw one thread only from the skein, tangled as it 
is, even at the risk of sometimes breaking it short off, and 
with the certainty of losing a thousand indications of the 
old mythology quite as interesting and as important to 
the subject. 

The example I select then is the old Egyptian word TB, 
meaning a vase or pot* and pronounced in modern 
Egyptian or Coptic taibi. That its central idea was that 
of hollowness, or a receptacle, is seen by reference to the 
old Egyptian tf, Coptic thbai, a cavern ; f tpt, Coptic taibi, 
a boat ; J and tba, Coptic tebe, a box, chest, coffer, sarcopha- 
gus or cqffbi.§ This last form of the word is made by two 
signs upon the monuments, — an unknown object and the 
human leg; the unknown object being evidently a ship - 
water-mountain monogram, occurring in exactly this shape 
as one of the forms of the Cadmean letter A (Figure 8, 
p. 235). The old Egyptian word for prostration in prayer, 
was this word tb repeated, thus : tb-tb. A prayer itself 
they called tb-ti ; which was also their name for sandals 
or shoes ; that is, the little ships in which we place our feet 
when we make a journey, or go a voyage. They called by 
nearly the same name, tb-t, the hippopotamus, or river 
beast, sacred to their Arkite goddess Isis. 

Now if you will refer to any copy of the First Book of 
Moses, G-enesis, printed in Hebrew, you will see that the 
word rendered in our English version ark (of course 
it is Noah's Ark, and not the Ark of the Covenant) is this 
same Egyptian word for a box, coffer, or sarcophagus, TBE 
(nun) ; and Gesenius says of it in his dictionary that its 
etymology is quite unknown. Gesenius was the greatest 
of modern Hebrew lexicographers. But here is just where 
the old lexicography has always been at fault. No lexi- 
cographer has ever yet succeeded in getting one word out 

* Bunsen's Egypt, Eng. Edit., Vocabulary, No. 516, page 482. 
f No. 547. % No. 549. 

§ No. 517, 569 ; and its determinative is the lid of a box, No. 136, 
page 550. 



316 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 

of another in an infinite backward series. You must, 
sooner or later, come to some beginning, — some first word 
in the series.. That word must either be an instinctive utter- 
ance of the physical organs, or else it must be an artificial 
word, a manufactured word, a word invented by the fancy. 
Now this word TBE is from its very nature one of this last 
sort. Its true etymology therefore cannot be discovered, un- 
less one will first provide oneself with some sure clue through 
the fantastic mysteries of the old alphabet -makers. We 
may not hit precisely upon all the details of the explanation ; 
we may make minor errors in portraying this or that 
feature ; — but we cannot be far wrong in an analysis based 
upon principles involving nothing but a knowledge of 
human nature and the monuments of authentic history. 

As one of the two letters of the old Egyptian word was 
evidently constructed upon the Arkite plan, and represents 
an hour-glass crossed by the water-line ; so it is quite pos- 
sible that the three letters of the Hebrew word were chosen 
with the same three Arkite elements in view, T to represent 
the mountain, B (Beth, a house) to represent the ark, and 
E (the soft aspirate, equivalent to the sibilant) to represent 
the water.* The Greeks have preserved for us the actual 
final S, in the name they gave in common to the three most 

* The discussion of such an etymology is of course one of the most 
difficult of all tasks, because, from the very nature of the case, the evidence 
cannot be direct, but merely inferential, or circumstantial as the lawyers 
say. That there was an original connection of the closest kind between 
the words tor, kar, nab,, tab, and one or two other prime Arkite radicals, 
is demonstrable. It is also certain that tor and kar are in a multitude of 
cases contractions from ta-bor and ka-bar. It is therefore possible that 
tab is also a contraction from tarb ; and the story of Moses marrying 
Tharbe when he entered Meroe, and many other similar indications, point 
that way. Sometimes these monosyllables look like primary bardic roots, 
and sometimes like compounds. Even bar itself, which has the most 
radical aspect of them all, may itself be a compound of b and ar ; for hor 
is the Shemite word for mountain. But, on the other hand, when the 
labial disappears entirely from a word it often leaves behind it to mark its 
place an aspirate lenis or a vowel, or even a sibilant. To complicate the 
difficulties there come in the various articles, P in Egyptian, H in Hebrew. 
T in Greek, and It in the Uomanic and Teutonic languages._ bar may 
possibly be explained by P-TOR, Egyptian, the mountain, which gave the 
Greeks their personal name Peter (irtrpog), convertible into Selas, its 
Hebrew form. The subject affords a series of extremely difficult prob- 
lems when taken in detail, while as a whole it carries an open demonstra- 
tion in its face. — See Appendix to page 316, for Beth-ark. 



XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 317 

celebrated sacred cities of classical antiquity : the Thebes of 
Bceotia, the Thebes of Phrygia, and the hundred-templed * 
Thebes of Egypt, as old Homer loves to call it in his Iliad. 
The monumental name, however, was not Thebes, but 
TABA. 

The Egyptian Thebes was the centrepoint of Arkite 
mythology, from the times of the eleventh dynasty, when 
Arkism had become a state religion in Egypt, and had its 
priesthoods, mysterious ceremonials, and architects. It 
was more than a thousand years after the building of the 
Memphite pyramids that Thebes became the capital shrine f 
of that resplendent symbolism. Within its walls were 
clustered those lofty corridors and gateways which illus- 
trated the glory of the Middle Kingdom of Egyptian history, 
and strike the traveller to-day with the same awe which 
the ancients felt for them. It is a city, every stone of 
which tells some diluvial story. Every temple in it had the 
Arkite cornice over it, with the cord moulding for a water- 
line, Every one of its columns was a rock standing out 
from a marsh of water-lilies. Every capital was an ark 
from which the imprisoned Noah looked forth upon his 
worshippers, visibly or invisibly. 

And if we turn to the Boeotian Thebes, at the siege of 
which all the mythical heroes of Greece and all the gods of 
Olympus assisted, as at the siege of Troy, — younger and 
far less fortunate and splendid than her Egyptian proto- 
type, — yet there is scarcely an allusion to her in the old 
Greek poets which does not carry a meaning essentially 
and formally diluvial. The story of the dried- up lake ; the 
story of the siege itself; the part her heroes took in the 
wars of Troy, that poetical TOE or TABOR, defended by 
HEC-TOR, "the Lord of the Tor/ — all show how well the 
older Nilotic symbolism flourished when, transplanted to the 
shores of the JEgean Sea and crowned with Delphian laurel, 
it was made beautiful and youthful with the food and airs 
of Greece. 

And this is all the more surprising when we remember 

* Hundred-gated. But the gates were no doubt the vast propylsea or 
gateways to the temples. 

t The Isle of Meroe also represented the Ark of Osiris, which was 
named by the Greeks Baris ((3apiQ) } from which we get our word Bark, a 
ship, &c. 



318 * ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

how opposite the airy liberty of the Athenian gentleman 
was to the stiff formalism of the Memphite or Theban 
ecclesiastic. Among the heavy Boeotians the ancient 
doctrines might breed for ever unchanged. But even 
within sight of Mars Hill the old Pelasgic population tilled 
the fields and kept the ancient Berber traditions unchanged. 

But what is calculated most of all to impress us is the 
fact of the universality of this Arkism in the ancient world. 
At one moment we are inclined to call it Pelasgic, at the 
next Phoenician, Phrygian, or Thracian. Now, it seems to 
have its principal seat in Egypt proper. Then, a crowd of 
geographical names on the monuments seem to refer it to the 
desert of Sahara, or to the negro continent of the head- waters 
of the Nile. Now, one remembers that the Athenians and 
other Greeks were Heraclidas, that is, immigrants from the 
valley of the Indus, and that modern Hindustan, like 
ancient India, is full of Arkite names and monuments and 
ceremonies. The northern Scythia is also unmistakably 
an Arkite region ; and so is Western or Celtic Europe. We 
can turn in no direction without seeing this round sky of 
aboriginal mythology touch and rest upon the earth. China, 
Japan, Corea, and the Australian Archipelago, the scattered 
islands of the Pacific and the southern continent of 
America, are full of every kind and degree of Arkite name 
and thing of history or reverence. 

Its great antiquity alone will account for this its univers- 
ality ; and only by going back as I have done to the be- 
ginnings of recorded history, and by selecting objects from 
well-known localities to compare with one another, can we 
get any notion of the genuine meaning of this Ark or 
Thebes whose name has been stamped in a thousand styles 
upon the many-sided life of the world. 

Keeping still close to Egypt then, but with our eyes 
open to resemblances in other countries, let me give you 
three or four instances of the propagation of the Theban 
idea among the Hebrews. 

I have already given you one — the mark of the sacred 
TAV. 

Another of the same sort occurs in the Hebrew word for 
goodness, holiness, or orthodox purity, TOB. This word, 
so incessantly employed in the Hebrew scriptures, — as it 
is the word which the traveller oftenest hears in Egypt, still, 



XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 319 

tail! well! — meant something far different from the later 
and larger abstract Greek conception of holiness, freed from 
dependence upon priestcraft and ceremonial oaths of ini- 
tiation and thunders of excommunication. The hiKaiocrvvr} 
of the writers of the New Testament, the hiKaios and 81*77 
of Plato and Aristotle, like the Latin dico, I say (allied to 
hziKvvixi, our English word to teach) was worthy of the 
artistic simplicity of the Grecian intellect, and of its pro- 
phecy of modern science. It was not at Thebes, it was 
not at Jerusalem, nor at Oxford and Cambridge, that such 
a change of name for relationship of the creature to the 
Creator could have taken place. Only to Job in the plains 
of Moab, to Jesus at Nazareth of Galilee, to Peter on the 
tanner's roof at Joppa, or to Colenso among the Natalese 
of Southern Africa, could the inspiration come that ' every 
man that doeth right must be accepted of God/ Yet even 
the Greeks who had learned hiKanqv, righteousness, still re- 
tained a tradition of the old sacerdotal Arkite word, in the 
list of their sub-olympian deities, as <d"EMis, goddess of 
justice. The earliest church establishment at the dawn of 
history, equally with the latest sect of modern bigots, 
claimed the prerogative of the Royal exchequer to refuse 
the right of circulation to the holiness of the soul before it 
had received the stamp of the temple. And the legal lan- 
guage of the nineteenth century contains more than one 
relic of these ancient Arkite days when church and state 
were one, the king a priest, and the priest a king, when 
Bards and Barons exercised co-ordinate sacerdotal and 
judicial powers on the Barrow, or prophesied from the cell 
beneath it. The English judge is still a Baron. The 
criminal is brought to the Bar. Ship crimes are called 
par excellence Barratry. If the accused have done no 
wrong he is declared Pure. If he be guilty he can still 
be Par-doned. Then there ai*e other words derived from 
the TOE or tabor. Our lawyers say that a Tort has been 
committed, and the accused must be Tried. This word 
once had a more dreadful meaning than now, for it was 
equivalent to being Tor-tur-ed, and Tor-mented. When 
we complain of being tired, we are not aware how fearful 
was the meaning of that word also once. Dar/mess also 
took its name from the cell beneath the tor. But to re- 
turn to our theme :• — 



320 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 

A third illustration of the use of the word TAB in 
Hebrew is the exact opposite of the last one. For, as I 
have already somewhere in the course of these lectures 
remarked, all spiritual expressions are disposed to polarize 
themselves, — to have a north and a south pole, morally, 
so to speak, — to take on two contrary meanings. Barak, 
in Hebrew, meant to bless and to curse. Sacer, in Latin, 
meant devoted to the gods as pure, and devoted to the 
devils as vile. This is precisely the case with the word 
TABU as used over the whole Pacific Ocean : it represents 
anything set aside ecclesiastically.* It occurs repeatedly 
in the Hebrew Scriptures as TTIOBE (rrnyin) m connec- 
tion with the Exodus from Egypt : as in 1 Gen. xliii. 32 : 
{ For to eat bread with the Hebrews was tabu to the 
Egyptians/ Gen. xlvi. 34 : ' Every shepherd was a tabu of 
the Egyptians/ Ex. viii. 25, 26 : ■ For they would have 
to sacrifice the tabu of the Egyptians/ i. e. the bull, or 
some other animal which the Egyptians worshipped. And 
when we turn to the Coptic language for an explanation of 
the Hebrew word, we find the Coptic word meaning to 
sanctify was TOUBE. How this Egyptian Thebism got to 
be so wide- spread as to cover all the islands of the Great 
Pacific Ocean we may well ask. But who has been yet able 
to trace the historical connection between the neckpillow of 
Egypt and its facsimile now used by the shock-headed 
negroes of the Feejee Islands ? Or who has yet explained 
the presence of the Australian boomerang upon the monu- 
ments of Egypt ? The coincidence, however, of the 
boomerang, the neckpillow, and the tabu system of Egypt, 
in the remote East, and at the present day, may open our 
eyes to the permanence of human thoughts and uses, and 
lead us to search for the most ancient relics of the past in 
the most retired nooks of the present world. 

A fourth illustration of the use of the radical TAB in its 
Arkite or Theban meaning, in the Hebrew language, is 
afforded by such a proper name as David, when we regard 
the final d as an attributive affix. The greatest man of 
ancient times — if influence over the religious feelings of all 
succeeding ages can be accepted as a true criterion of 
greatness in any man — the man after God's own heart, as 

* T. 14. 26. T. 34. 53. 



XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 321 

priestcraft calls him, — the pivot of all ecclesiasticism, — 
the true intellectual founder of that Hebrew Arkism which 
his son Solomon raised to the summit of political glory, — 
what other name could this man have had bestowed upon 
him but that of DAYiD, the Theban, the man of the Ark, 
par excellence, the man belonging to the Tab ? For, while 
the Hebrew writers speak of the ark of Moses, David and 
Solomon, by the later name Am, the Arabian writers 
always call it by the name which the Jews reserved for the 
ark of Noah, TABwT, and at the same time they call the 
king by the same name BAB^D.* 

A fifth illustration, of much interest, is found in the He- 
brew name of the jackal, TaB, 2T) } the canis aureus of Lin- 
neus, ' whose monotonous wail may be heard every night 
over the whole extent of the Desert of Sahara, whether by 
the camp-fire, or under the protection of the oasis/ f The 
Arabs call it Dheel*. The importance of the word lies in 
the fact that it is the A'HUP of the monuments, (see page 
300,) the first god Anubis of Egypt ; a word quite equiva- 
lent to the A'DaM of the early Hebrew mythology, the 
father of mankind. It is peculiarly important to notice 
the prefix character of the A, which is extremely common 
in Arkism, and explains a multitude of otherwise inscru- 
table mysteries in the names of persons and things, always 
indicating that such names are taken from the mountain 
symbol. (See Appendix to page 300.) 

I cannot stop longer to collect illustrations of the trans- 
plantation of the word TAB upon Greek and Roman soil, 
or to follow it in all its wanderings to other lands, and its 
adoption (with fall Arkite meaning) into other lauguages. 
I will only draw your attention to it in the Latin form of 
"EAYis, a ship, Greek, Naus, which has given to modern 
architecture its term, the Nave of a church. 

* H. 8. 1, b. I. The Arabic legend gives also Taint for Saul, and 
Djalut for Goliath. 

t Tristram's Great Sahara. London, 1860. There are several other 
kinds of jackals in the north of Africa. The Vulpes vulgaris (L.), Vulpes 
Niloticus (Cuv.), the common Egyptian fox, very common in the south. 
Vulpes famelicus (L.)> a pretty little fox confined to Southern Algeria, and 
the Fennicus Brucei (Desm.), the lovely little cunning, affectionate, squir- 
rel-like fennie, half the size of a cat, with large ears and a bushy tail, 
caught by the boys throughout the rolling sand deserts. Besides these 
there are the Lepus Mediterraneus and Lepus JEgypthis (Geof.). 

21 



322 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

A truce then to these antiquities ! But where, you 
will ask me, where is this oldest of Arkite words, this 
Thebes or TAB, to be found on earth to-day ? I answer — 
everywhere. Every woman has the word upon her lips as 
a household thing; at least on washing day; it is our 
homely English tub. Sailors call every slow old ship a 
tub. And can we see no meaning in the legend that the 
founder of the cynics dogmatized in a tub, when we remem- 
ber that his name, Diogenes, meant goddess born ? Dio- 
genes philosophized in his tub in obedience to the same 
Arkite prejudice which forced the fanatical Simeon Stylites 
to prophesy for forty years on the summit of a Corinthian 
column, drawing up his daily food with a rope from the 
awe-struck crowds below. 

The Theb that gave the Greeks their name for a goddess* 
DIVa, — whether the gift came by the way of Arya or direct 
from Egypt matters not, — has given us our name for that 
most wonderful, most mystic, and most beautiful of all 
things, the drop of DEW. 

One of the most beautiful forms in which the old word 
Thebeh appears in our modern vernacular is the name of 
the bird which every poet, every lover, knows so well, the 
favourite Christian symbol too of that divine providence, 
that celestial Sophia, that benevolent wisdom, which broods 
upon the stormy waters of human life, preserving, en- 
lightening, and immortalizing mankind. The DOVe was a 
favourite Arkite symbol long before the baptism of our 
Lord. How beautifully it plays its part in the story of the 
Deluge. Scholars have not failed to draw attention to the 
identity of its Hebrew name Jon with that of Jonah, who 
typified the Noah in the legend of the whale, and with 
that of John, the beloved apostle, which leaned at supper- 
time on Jesus' breast, and with that of John the Baptist, 
before whose eyes his feathered namesake hovered down 
from heaven to rest on Jesus' head.f 

In the eyes of the ancients all birds in general, and as 
such, were accounted symbols of the ark. Aristophanes 
founded his half- satirical, half-mystical drama upon this 
sentiment. The whole system of auspices hence derived 

* And for a wealthy man DlVes. 
f The Toni of India will be noticed farther on. See p. 326. 



XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 323 

its force.* A multitude of bizarre and picturesque legends, 
in all ages and among all nations, have been in vogue, 
founded upon a traditionary reverence for this primeval 
relationship of bird to lard. Sinbad's HOC was merely an 
Arabian inversion of the ARK. You may recall the horror 
of the genius of the lamp when, by the advice of the 
wicked magician, poor Aladdin ordered him to procure a 
roc's egg to be hung up under his palace dome ; why ! 
the roc's egg was the King of the Genii ! We read in 
the Mohammedan books of a great bird called DAM, — a 
word, the equivalent of TAB.f The great flying dragon 
of the Chinese is called TAP. J 

The ancients believed that there was a language of 
birds which Solomon and his free-masons alone under- 
stood; meaning, of course, a secret language of bards or 
priests ; and the eastern story has it, that the Hoopoo was 
excommunicated because he betrayed the knowledge of 
this bird-language to men,§ 

But why was the dove picked out of all the families of 
birds to be the special type and bear the very name of the 
Theb, through all ages, to the present dfty ? Why among 
all the birds were just the turtle-doves the only birds that 
could be offered in sacrifice before the Hebrew ark ? Why 
did the Greeks call it irepis-Ttp-a ? || Why do the Germans 
call it Turtel-taube, and the English turtle-dove ? What 
have the turtles to do with the doves ? Nothing but a 
genuine Arkism could bring these two creatures together, 
representing as they do two totally different kingdoms of 
the animal world : the one inhabiting the air, the other 
the sea ; the one the swiftest, the other the slowest of all 
animals. But the fancy is a fire which fuses together the 
most opposite elements. The Indian mythology begins 
with the mysterious postulate that the earth is sustained 
upon an elephant (the living ALP) ; and the elephant is 

* See Appendix to p. 322. 

f Its connection with Janus and Diana is more doubtful ; although 
these deities are male and female representatives of the ark (the moon), 
and of the man of the ark (Noah), with his face set two ways, backward 
to the world before the flood and forward to the new dispensation. They 
bear a relation to each other like that of Is-iri (Osiris) and Is-is. She is 
the virgin mother of God, and he the God of re-established peace. T. 17. 
44. See also the verse about the Devil and his Dam, T. 16. 12. 

% T. 14. 21. § See Appendix to p. 323. || J. 6. 2. 



324 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

standing on a turtle's back (the summit of the TOR pro- 
jecting from the water) ; but the turtle stands on nothing, 
the beginning is reached, history can go no farther back 
than Ararat, the aboriginal TOR. 

But this digression gives us no direct information on 
the subject of the dove. Let us apply then for an explan- 
ation to the language of ancient Rome, the Ramah of the 
west, one of the chief seats of ancient, as it is the capital of 
modern, Arkism ; for many questions of this nature can be 
answered there. The Eomans called the dove TUR-TUR, 
the bird of the Tor, par excellence. Now we can see why 
the Greeks called it Peeis-tee, that is, the /3apts of the Tor, 
the ship of the rock. Turtel-tauhe, then, in modern Ger- 
man means simply the mountain-bird. The Roman re- 
duplication TUR-TUR, tur-tle, expressed a noun of multi- 
tude. The plural is commonly made in this way by 
savages, and was probably always so made in the most 
ancient languages. It is the same influence which induces 
English women to say incessantly 'Very very,' when 
American women content themselves with simply c Very/ 
The dove not onlj- by its habits of building its nest in the 
rocks, then, but also by its gregarious habits, building in 
colonies, and flying in swarms, represented those religious 
communities of priests, whose lamaseries and monasteries 
have played so important a role in architectural history ; 
and those thousands of solitary anchorites whose cells 
honey-combed the rocky sides of every desert valley and of 
every sea-girt mountain. They represented also those 
more solemn communities of the departed dead, whose 
f eternal mansions ' pitted the rock-walls of the valley of 
the Nile, and made cavernous the limestone escarpments 
of Palestine. 

The recent investigations of M. Rossi in the catacombs 
of Rome, rivalling in interest those of M. Mariette upon 
the site of ancient Memphis, have brought to light the fact 
that they were not quarries merely, adopted afterwards by 
the persecuted sect of Christians as places of refuge, chapels 
of worship and burial-places for the martyrs ; but that they 
were authorized and regulated cemeteries, separately owned 
by chartered companies, protected by the Roman govern- 
ment, and used not only by the Christians, but by the 
Latin population previous to the time of Christ. They 



XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 325 

grew in course of time to so vast a size that their galleries 
communicated across the boundary lines ; and the direction 
of their growth was determined by the desire felt by the 
Christians to be buried as near as possible to any martyr 
of peculiar sanctity or fame. These catacombs were all 
arranged on one plan however ; and this is the interesting 
point which I wish just now to keep in view. They were 
excavated in parallel corridors, in the sides or walls of 
which the bodies of the dead were laid in oblong chambers, 
arranged in separate columbaria, or Dove-cotes. These 
were no new invention. In ages long preceding the 
Roman Empire, this was a common mode of building a 
necropolis, and it had its influence in fixing a religious 
meaning to the name and habits of the birds of which I 
am now speaking. 

But there are other mythological connections to be 
noticed. In Egypt and in ancient Greece there was an 
order of priests, habitually called black doves ; and the 
title does not seem to be one given in derision, like that of 
crows given to the priests by the modern inhabitants of 
Italy. * The same cause gave the Delphic priestesses the 
name of bees, melissce. The multitudes of doves through- 
out the coasts of Syria strike travellers with wonder; 
stock-doves (Columba cenas), and ring-doves (0. palumbus), 
and common pigeons (C. domestica), Barbary Carriers, 
Turkish Crisps, and Persian Shakers, fill the air; while 
their numbers and gyrations are watched by modern sooth- 
sayers as anxiously and wisely as in any ancient day. But 
they are even more abundant still in the mountain-chains 
of the Indus, the Coh-i- Suleiman, which in fact is called 
in the Sanscrit ARGa-varta, land of the dove. You see that 
•in the sacred tongue of the East, the dove is called the ark. 

It was not so much because of these gregarious traits 
of character in a wild state, as on account of the domestic 
habits of the dove, its usefulness to the family, and its 
sociableness with man, that it became remarkable in 

* It may, however, have had some connection with pictures of priests 
letting loose carrier pigeons seen upon the monuments. This was one 
of their favourite tricks, and one of the most mysterious and efficient 
means at their command to keep up religious communication over all the 
ancient world, and preserve an influence over the politics of all the an- 
cient states. — See Appendix to page 325. 



326 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 

ancient eyes. But it was given to Venus, not because 
of its loving disposition, for it is as ill-natured as all other 
birds, but because Venus was herself the representative 
goddess of the ark, and claimed ^the dove on account of 
the olive branch. Cama the god of love, the hindu Cupid, 
is seen in Coleman's Hindu Mythology, plate 21, riding on 
a dove with his bow and arrow ready to shoot. In the 
phallism of India the female member bears the Hebrew 
name of the dove Yoni. 

But if the dove was peculiarly sacred in an Arkite sense, 
it had not much pre-eminence before other almost equally 
venerated birds, such as the hawk of Horus, the eagle of 
Jove, and the owl of Pallas. I repeat it, all birds, without 
an exception, had an Arkite sacredness in the eyes of the 
ancients. And why ? Not only because they floated on 
the air as ships upon the water, but because they construct- 
ed nests. And every nest is a wonder of nature, an inspira- 
tion from God, a miracle of unpretending skill, a lesson 
to man of patience, taste, and foresight ; a symbol of the 
marriage-bed, the ante-type and archi-type of home. But 
more than this is it, or rather was it, to the ancients. 
Poised on a tree-branch, rocking in the wind, freighted 
with its helpless, timorous, clamorous, new-born, open- 
mouthed, and large-eyed little family, it was a symbol of 
New Generation, and of the beginning of things ; of the ark 
perched (bae-K6c/) upon Mt Ararat, holding its family of 
Noachides. 

The nest, therefore, was called by the Greeks the little 
ship veoo-G-ia ;* as the oak tree was called by them the mount- 
ain, hpvs, toeus ; and as the bard-baron who taught and 
judged and sacrificed beneath its living tumulus of green 
leaves was called the Druid, the man of the toe-teee, i. e. 
the oak, which more than all other trees resembles a 
rounded mountain, and in the hollow trunk of which the 
Druid found both cell and shrine. 

The nest of every bird, therefore, was a sacred symbol 
I of the ark to the ancients ; and those were the most re- 

* Nfoffffeuw, to build a nest. Pathey gives in his vocabulary four or five 
separate and very different Coptic words for nest. I have already men- 
tioned the fact that both the Greek and Latin vavg (nafis), navis, and the 
English and German ship, schiffe, are dialectic conversions of the same 
radical letters which make the Egyptian and Hebrew TBE and TAEBE. 



XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 327 

vered winch were built most prominently in sight about 
the dwellings of the people. The poetic veneration for 
the stork, for instance, that universal substitute for the 
dragon on the lacquered ware and temple walls of the 
Japanese — that household god of the inhabitants of the 
delta of the Rhine, recalls the affectionate reverence which 
the dwellers in the valley of the Nile felt for the same 
bird five thousand years ago. Its flight, its body stilted 
(s-tol), like a shepherd of the landes of Gascony, upon a 
triangle made of its two diverging legs, — but especially 
its trick of building its little ship upon the gabel {gibel, 
Arabic for mountain) of the house, or on the chimney-top, 
that tower above the hearth, that temple of the household 
lares* — all combined to make it an object of curiosity, 
affection, and Arkite significance. Hence its name of 
STOXL&, the bird of the mystic TOR. Hence it was 
adopted by the Egyptian mystagogues to represent in 
their hieroglyphic alphabet the local deluge of the Nile 
valley. You may see it, drawn as in fig. 19, sitting on 
a black pyramid, on the monuments.f Bunsen gives it as 
No. 291 in his ( Vocabulary of Ideographs/ He calls it, 
indeed, l a Nycticorax alighted on a heap of corn/ but he 
gives as its hieroglyphic meaning ' to inundate, inunda- 
tion, to swell, harvest. 3 % 

Fig. 19. 




*tw 




AB-HOU S-^ BA BA R)( R)( BAK 

The step from this first application to the deluge, and 

* There is a whole train of Arkisms connected with the names for the 
chimney-stack in various languages ; and not the least curious of them is 
the application of the term (chemine) to the preposterous high heels of 
the ladies of the middle ages, which in Yenice attained the fabulous 
altitude of a foot-and-half, so that the dame of fashion had to promenade 
between two gentlemen or two servants, leaning her arms, bent at the 
elbow, on their shoulders ; and severe, but of course inoperative, sump- 
tuary laws were made against the fashion by the Council of Ten. All 
these allied facts are explained by a single and direct reference to the 
word Ca-bar, in its various dialectic forms, as gibel, gabel, gable, cobald, 
cobold, cobalt, cabalistic, &c, meaning ' related to the sacred bar.' 

f See Appendix. % With the sound AB-HU, or BAH. 



328 ON AEKITB SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

the new humanity, or to the inundation of the Mle with 
the new harvest, to that of a genius of life, was easy to 
make. Therefore the Egyptian mystagogues used the 
standing stork-like figure, with legs outstretched, and a 
tuft of hair falling from its breast (like the long beard 
given to the figures of the male gods), as seen in fig. 19, to 
express the human soul* 

But as I have already said, the stork was not alone in 
this beautiful idealism. All birds, by their swift and 
varied flight, suggested the idea of thought. The priests 
therefore portrayed the soul also by means of another 
hieroglyph, a bird with black wings and a human head 
and face, as in fig. 19. f But did the scribe wish to write 
pure spirit, he drew a Numidian crane, fig. 19, and pro- 
nounced it in his reading, AE,K,J or a phoenix with human 
hands uplifted above a star, as in fig. 19, pronouncing 
the same word ARK. But when he wished to designate a 
divine spirit, a divinity, a god, he selected a bird of high 
flight and piercing vision, the kingly soaring and swoop- 
ing haivk, writing it before the name of the deity, which he 
gives in phonetic letters (fig. 19). And the name of this 
hawk-god symbol was BAK, from which we may probably 
derive the Bacchus of the Greeks, and the Tartar bog, 
meaning god. 

But to return to our Theban nest (which I am loth to 
leave without an illustration or two more), and keeping in 
mind its Arkite meaning of a little ship, I will draw your 
attention first to the 325th ideograph of Bunsen's list 
(fig. 19), S'x ' ^ nest of birds/ which bore the unexpected 
meaning water-places and to fill; still in reference to the 
inundation and the deluge. Now look at this woodcut 
figure 20. It is a drawing of two antique candelabra, 
which stand beside one of the open doorways in the great 
corridor of the Vatican Museum. You see that they con- 
sist of the trunks of two trees — oak trees, apparently, 
from their gnarled and knotted bark — with enough of the 
first circle of their branches left uncut to hold three nests, 

* Pronounced BA. See Appendix to page 327. 

t Pronounced EA. Ideograph No. 322. Champollion's Dictionary, 
54. The Hebrew word for the face of man and for the presence of God 
was PE, ;-f£) 

% U x . Idiograph 292. 



XI.] 



ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 



129 



Fig. 20. Antique Candelabra in the Vatican Museum. 





one on the one tree, and two on the two forked branches 
of the other. In the first nest lie — not three unfledged 
birds, as in the Egyptian hieroglyphic — but three lovely 
baby children ; and in each of the other two are packed 
five similar little cherubs, making ten in all. Here is a 
two-fold presentation of the self- same myth, done in the 
finest style of the most advanced taste of the classic age 
of art. On the one side you have the symbolic reproduc- 
tion of the ark and its three principal deities, the three 
Cabiri, the Dii Major es. In the other you have the Dii 
Minores, the Daktuloi, or finger-gods of Thrace, the ten 
digits of the human hand, the ten creators, also called 
Cabiri, or gods of the old Cabala, but representatives of 
the family of the NoachidE©.* 



* As I have shown in speaking of the arm and hand oh page 234 above. 
The word, daktuloi, looks as if it were compounded of deka, ten, and tel, 
mountain. For the word Thumb is closely connected with Tom, tumulus, 
as is plainly shown by all the nursery stories of Tom Thumb, &c, and 
numerous talmudic stories, such as that of Abram preserved in a cave 
from the cruelty of Nimrod, sucking his thumbs, from one of which he 



330 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 

It is needless to remind you what various changes in 
the form of the myth two or three thousand years of 
priestcraft must have created. The Hebrew story of the 
flood makes use of the number eight. But the number of 
persons in the ark varies in other myths. Sometimes 
they included Noah with his three sons, making the num- 
ber four. Sometimes his wife, Anna, and their three wives 
are added, making the number eight. The Egyptian 
system of the middle empire duplicated all its deities. 
Its object was to represent the female principle always by 
the side of the male. Thus gradually there arose a com- 
bination of the ship symbol, which was always female, 
with the mountain symbol system, which was properly a 
male. This introduced, in course of time, a bewildering 
confusion between the ship and mountain symbols, which 
would require a volume to illustrate instead of a single 
lecture. Even the Greeks were no strangers to this acci- 
dent. The pure ship symbols, Yenus and Diana, were 
the only really unmarried deities they had ; I mean the 
aboriginal Yenus, riding in her shell upon the waters ; 
and the Diana riding as a crescent through the sky — 

' That orbed maiden, 
With white fire laden, 
Whom mortals call the moon.' 

The number of the children, therefore, in the nests of 
our candelabra was not an essential point. These can- 
got milk and from the other honey, until he grew up. One of the most 
beautiful and perfect Arkite traditions remaining in England, is the 
touching story of Peeping Tom of Coventry [Kabar-tor] and the good 
Countess, who was compelled to ride naked, covered only with her great 
vail of streaming, waving, golden hair, upon a horse through the streets, 
while all the inhabitants were forbidden to appear. Tom only peeped. 
The top of the Ararat was the only residue of all the earth that watched 
the Gene-vra {yvvq (3api), the lady bark, upon her lonely ride to save the 
perishing humanity. The same sort of connection between the Tom or 
Tor and the Bar is seen in the story of Martha (flapig) capturing the 
dragon of Tar-ascon ; and in the universal spread of the household fame 
of the dear lady Queen Bertha, whose home was equally in Provence, in 
Switzerland, where she has the reputation of having buiit all the Towers, 
and in Germany, where she is made the same as Eve : — 
1 When Adam ploughed and Bertha span 
Where was then the gentleman ? ' 
In English it runs : — 

' When Adam delved and Eve span,' &c. 



XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 331 

delabra remain among the most curious and precious relics, 
not only of the art of the classic world, but of that fertile 
fancy which laid hold of every object in the wide circlet 
of the world to make some record on it of the aboriginal 
worship of mankind. 

Have I wearied you with these details ? It is only by 
heaping up data, one by one, that modern science builds 
its pyramids. It is only by the widest synthesis that we 
obtain our largest truths. It is only by showing you the 
same mythological fossils buried in the histories and lan- 
guages of distant lands that I can prove to you the se- 
quence in time, and the outspread in space of this grand 
mythological stratification of the spiritual world. I wish 
to show you that there must have been a profound and 
universal substratum of the mystical, the Cabalistic, sup- 
porting all the outer and more material life of the early 
ages of mankind, saturated with this Arkism, — this idea of 
the salvation of the human race from a deluge of waters, 
by means of a floating sanctuary, stranded at length upon 
some Ararat, from the sides of which the repossession of 
the devastated earth, and the rehabilitation or rejuvenation 
of humanity commenced again. 

And therefore it is that we have the names of the old 
Gods in our business and baby talk. Our boys play with 
the holy emblems of the ancient faiths. Did you ever no- 
tice that annual series of boys' games, which moves on 
with the seasons, almost unseen beneath our eyes, pre- 
occupied as they are with Christian and modern affairs ? 
It is a veritable dervish-dance of mythological antiquities. 
It is a procession of symbols handed down from the most 
Arkite times ; not by monuments, not in books, not by 
pandects and scholia ; but by a free-masonry and tradition 
which only children understand. Its rules, its etiquette, 
its arrangements of times, and places, and shapes, its 
catchwords and penalties, have all been floating together 
down the ages on the ceaseless flood of child-play, foaming 
and sparkling and murmuring in the sunshine of parental 
and divine affection, over the whole surface of the earth. 
Notice these games, and you will see that they are all 
Druidic. I will not now stop to explain them; indeed, 
they need no elaborated explanation. But I ask you to re- 
gard that one of them which commences the series, the 



332 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

TOP.. It is spun before us, on every pavement, in the 
spring. It is the most perfect emblem of the primeval 
Theb, whose name it bears. Its cord, like that which 
underlies the Egyptian temple cornice, and occurs so fre- 
quently in the Gothic mouldings, is the water symbol. 
Once it was lashed by priests, in sacred fury, round the 
temple floor, with a whip of many cords, to represent the 
multitudinous waves, roaring around the ark. Not ten 
years ago, in the heart of Arabia, the traveller Palgrave 
was clandestinely smoking his cigar outside of the walls of 
Riadh, the capital city of the Wahabees, when he was ap- 
proached by a boy, who was amusing himself with just 
such a top as Palgrave had many a time played with in Eng- 
land, when he was himself a child. The boy spun the top 
in his left hand. Then he took it upon his right-hand 
forefinger, and keeping it spinning there, held it up above 
his head, his arm at full length, and repeated the formula, 
e not by my strength, nor cleverness, but by the strength 
of God, and by the cleverness of God/* Palgrave relates 
the anecdote to illustrate the foolish and excessive fatalism 
of these fanatical mussulmen. But it teaches a far deeper 
and older lesson. 

And the rest of the series of these children's games, the 
hoop, the kite, the marbles, hop-skip, base ball, cricket, 
shinney (hocky as it is called in England), all of them are 
of a hoar and Druidical antiquity. You see the shinney on 
the coins of the Phoenician colonists. The kite, like the 
bird of the same name, receives that name from the same 
Arkite radical which gives name to the cat, the whale 
(/0770s), the cod, and to the ships of the Mediterranean Sea. 
Cricket is the game of the Druid kirk, and its character- 
istic is a wooden gate, or wicket, made in imitation of one 
of those tremendous trilithons which compose the circle of 
Stonehenge ; and the game is a mimic war between two 
parties, one of which represents the priesthood, whose 
whole business is to protect the sacred lintel, which the 
other party strive to cast down and destroy. The game of 
marbles represents a similar attack from outside foes upon 
the safety of the initiated in the Church, in the form of 
marbles in the ring ; for kirk or church is the same as 
kvkXos, or circle, in the Druid mythology of the past. The 
* Proc. Roy. Geog. Soe. 1846, Eeb. 22, p. 74. 



XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. • 333 

order of tlie Knights of the Temple were the last in Chris- 
tendom to keep alive the mystery of building circular 
churches. The very name TOE. alley, which the boys give 
to the great marble in the centre of the ring, is enough to 
show the Arkite tradition in the game. But above all, the 
game of hop-skip speaks for itself. No one can watch 
two boys draw with chalk on a pavement an oblong space 
terminating in an apse at one end, and divide it by cross 
lines, and draw a cross at the farther end, without seeing 
at once that the figure is the ground-plan of a French ca- 
thedral church. See how the little vagabonds then num- 
ber the included spaces with cyphers from 1 to 12, begin- 
ning at the square (west) end, and terminating in the 
round or choir end. Then see one of them take an oyster 
shell — a neophyte — and with great difficulty, hopping on 
one foot, and with all sorts of mystic motions and compli- 
cated rules of conduct, according to a well-established 
order of tradition, which his opponent jealously observes, 
being on the watch to trip him up at the least infraction of 
the rules, — and see him shove the oyster shell from division 
to division on towards the cross and altar-place, where 
the catechumen becomes a communicant, and the communi- 
cant a priest — and tell me there is nothing ancient, no- 
thing Archaic, nothing of the Eleusinian or still older Old 
Egyptian mysteries in that ! * 

I might carry you far into the forest of such mystical 
correlations of our own with former days, by following the 
clue which has thus far led us, the Theban name of Noah's 
ark. There are other clues of equal worth, but I have held 
to this, to show you how one such leads us on from one 
chamber of imagery to another, until we feel at home in the 
whole house of the faith of the early fathers of mankind. 
This clue we have been following is not yet half unrolled. 
The same old word — this Thebes — comes up in almost 
every trade and walk of life. 

* Many of these games bear in other languages equally significant 
Arkite names. For example, the game of nine-pins, a perfectly Druidic 
game, is called in French quilles. But Q,-UTL is the equivalent of Ca- 
BIL, and the meaning is simply, when carried back through all its ety- 
mologies, Cabalistic. Quille is the French equivalent for the ke'el of a 
ship. I say nothing here about the game of chess because it requires a 
study by itself. Its best form is the Chinese, wherein the opposing forces 
fight across a river that runs between them on the board. 



334 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

The old maid still pets her Tabby-cat, the mystic animal 
of all witch-stories ; the beast symbol, seen sitting on the 
sacred sistram of the Egyptian musical performers. 

The engineer, the bridge-builder, the chemist, has each 
his tube. It is the ancient Tuba, out of which the trombone 
of Pompeii came. The Mohammedan legend of Enoch says 
that the tallest and most beautiful of all the trees, standing 
in the centre of Paradise, was named Tuba ; and that Allah 
commanded it to bend its top over the outer walls, that 
Enoch might take hold thereon ; and so he was lifted over 
into Paradise.* And there is a curious story in the 
eastern books about King David and a tube : After the 
rebellion of Absalom, King David would no longer trust 
his own judgment. So he arranged an apparatus some- 
thing like that which good old Dr Hare of Philadelphia 
arranged before he died, to prove the reality of his com- 
munion with the spirit world. The king hung up a bell in 
the inside of a tube ; he would then place the accuser and 
accused one on each side of it. They would touch the 
tube by turns; and the ringing of the bell would designate 
the guilty. But it chanced one day that a thief was 
brought to judgment who had stolen a pearl ; and the bell 
gave no sign; and the king accused the bell of bribery; 
but he afterwards discovered that the cunning thief had 
hidden the pearl in his walking staff, and handed his staff 
to the accuser to hold, when he touched the tube. The in- 
sulted instrument of justice resented the king's suspicion 
of its virtue, and caused itself to be translated into heaven. 

These foolish Oriental stories are full of meaning. The 
Arabian Night's Entertainments are as much a mine of 
mythological wealth as the Hebrew Scriptures themselves. 
The proper names they use are significant of the oldest 
ideas of our race. But many of our own proper names, 
such as Charles and Thomas, James and John, Peter 
and Paul, date from the very invention of the alphabet. 
The first appearance of James and John is in an Egyptian 
history, as the Jannes and Jambres who withstood Moses, 
working miracles as wonderful, though not as powerful, as 
his. I have referred to the connection of the name of John 

* Wild's Legends (N. 5. 7. e.). The story of the Queen of Sheba, s. 
18, 19, p. 8, shows how the Qfjfi was typified long before the worship of 
Mary began. 



XI.] ON AEKITB SYMBOLISM. 335 

with the Dove or ark. The name of James was as closely 
and extensively connected with the Ambrose stones of the 
Druids, and the Ambrosia, or baptismal water of the Greek 
mythology.* The sinking Peter of the lake of Gennesareth 
and the Peter on whom the church was to be built, was 
emblematic of the submerged, restored, and re-established 
mountain. f In adopting these ancient personal names 
we propagate unconsciously the oldest known ideas of 
civilized mankind, mixing, however, with them, and in 
most respects overlaying and concealing them with the 
more intellectual, but not less symbolistic, ideas of all the 
ages that have intervened between the earliest and our 
own. 

All modern life is therefore impregnated with this 
ancient element. It is like gold in quartz, found every- 
where, on every hill-top, in every river-bar. One need but 
have it said, it is here — to look — and find it. It moves on 
the waters ; it springs from the ground in the names of 
plants ; it floats over our heads in the names of birds. The 
table, around which the family sodality institutes itself 
and comes to consciousness, is an antique Arkism, although 
it is the chief characteristic of modern civilization, for it is 
the altar of love (al toe), the tabor of home life. The 
S-tool,\ on which the mother sets her feet — the carpet on 
which the children play, the rug at our fireplace on which 
the cat is purring, are Arkite in their English names. The 
carpet especially figures in all Oriental tales with a mysti- 
cal meaning. We still use its classical name when we say 
tapestry ; or, that a subject of discussion is on the tapis. 
The cross-legged Turk upon his carpet, on his stone-floor, 
is the Boodh, the Noah, the Yishnu in his Theb, upon the 
waters. § 

Why does the Coptic woman of Egypt, at the present 
day, call the yeast with which she makes her bread myste- 
riously swell up, and grow full of cells, by the sacred name 

* H. 8. 1. r. 

f I have said above already, that P was the Egyptian masculine article. 
But the mythological symbolism must hold good, whether the etymology 
offered in the text be accepted or not. 

% Stol is the universal Sclavonic word for table ; showing not only the 
contraction of tabor into tor, but that the s is a prefix or denominative 
sign, and not a radical element of the word. 

§ TcnniQ, tapis, teppich (K. 13. 19.) 



336 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

of T/^AB ? * She knows no more about it than a priest in 
Germany does when he says taufen, to baptize, or we our- 
selves when we say in English dip, and deep, and dive,f in 
reference to water, or tip and top in reference to a moun- 
tain. A schoolmaster's etymology is a stupid affair, a 
handboard at the entrance of a cul-de-sac, or blind alley. 
An aboriginal Bardic word is a divine thing, casting a broad 
bar of light across the past, as the setting moon illuminates 
Lake Leman to the eyes of the pensionnaires of La Tour de 
Peilz when the Bize is blowing from the plains of Germany. 

I have made no attempt this evening to prove the ety- 
mologies with which I have plied your perhaps long since 
fatigued attention. That would have been an intolerable 
stupidity. In fact it could be done only by placing before the 
eye a multitude of tables, lists of words in many languages 
— not thrown together, pell-mell, in a heap, as is too often 
the case with those great works of German linguists which 
make the world stare and students despair, but arranged 
with all the care and skill that a man of physical science 
knows must be expended on a cabinet of modern history. 

But I have wished and tried to give you some idea of, 
or rather a g'enuine feeling for, the reality of the great in- 
visible and antique world of Types, as it exists about us 
also now — now in this ' Age of type ' as it has been called. 
Our printers play with things that they call types, and little 
do they think that every one of them was once fetich, a 
symbol of the gods, shem-baal (^MCDttf), o-rj/^a ttjs flapibos, 
the name of the Ark of Osiris. 

I have tried to show you also how this world of types 
possesses a life of its own, capable of indefinite expansion 
and self-reproduction. We must always distinguish — and 
hitherto it has not been sufficiently done — between the 
worship of man's spirit and that of man's imagination ; 
between the adoration of a God of love or vengeance, and 
the curious fetichistic respect for some suggestive figure, 
sound, or motion in nature. It astonishes the missionary 
to see a pagan alternately supplicate and revile an idol. 
It has puzzled the writers of the history of philosophy to 
explain the origin of Yezideeism or devil-worship. But, 
let us start fairly with some great event, impressing the 
resident human population of the globe with awe, and we 
* T. 28. 43. f T. 18. 42. 



XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 337 

can comprehend how the following generations occupied 
their uncultivated imaginations in separating the elements 
of its story, and in showing their veneration, gratitude, or 
terror, by inventing from all the vast materials of nature 
around them a symbolism, which became religious, without 
ever becoming simplified, without ever becoming stable. 
We can comprehend how the ark of Noah would be wor- 
shipped equally well under the form of the dove and of the 
hawk ; under the form of a rocking- stone and of a Doric 
capital ; under the form of a mandarin's button or a Venus' 
shell ; under the form of a Parthenon upon an Acropolis, 
and of a sepulchral chamber below the base of the pyramid 
of Cheops. If we divest ourselves of our habitual ideas of 
religion, got from the teachings of Christ, by which we 
are born into the belief that worship and adoration are the 
same thing, and are due to God alone, and without respect 
of places, we can then put ourselves in the position 
occupied by the aboriginal inhabitants of Switzerland, 
living on their pile-built platforms, dreading nothing 
so much as an inundation, and being without the dis- 
tinct imagination of a providential and protecting deity. 
Blind emotions, blind yearnings, blind fancies were theirs, 
groping after definite thoughts, struggling helplessly for 
liberation from the blackness of darkness. As at once 
naturalists and physiologists, we can dissect those fossil 
people ; and see in the casts of soul, which the mytholo- 
gies of not much later days afford for our inspection, 
incipient organisms, initial types, opening that series of 
the intellectual and spiritual fauna of historic deposits, 
which is the grand analogue to the geological column of 
genera and species in the rocks. It is as certain, in my 
opinion, that respect for the simplest forms of Arkite 
symbolism, an unsesthetic, unmetaphysical, unmathemati- 
cal, confused, dreamy, inconsistent veneration for what- 
ever suggested to the eye the ideas of the ship, the 
mountain, and the flood, — constituted the principal part of 
the early religion of the race, — as it is certain that trilobites 
and brachiopods monopolized the Silurian world. This 
granted, the conversion of species becomes an easier 
problem to solve in this domain of thought and feeling, 
than in that animal world. 

Arkism, like all other exhibitions of life in the universe, 

22 



338 . ON AEKITB SYMBOLISM. [lECT. 

carried in its own centre its own force of development. 
It looked ; it began to reason ; it invented ; it began to 
build. It readied towards the sun, and became Mithrism ; 
towards the stars, and became Sabaism ; towards commerce, 
and became architecture ; towards beauty, and became the 
splendid idolatry of Greece. It had its branch of politics 
in Celtic Druidism and the ritual of the great { high place/ 
old Eome. It had its branch of mysticism in the gnostic 
world of Asia. It has- its branch of humanity in the Monts 
de Piete of modern Europe. 

In a word, everything at the opening of the intellectual 
history of man was cabalistic; and most things remain 
cabalistic, in a mythologic sense, to the present day. 
Nine-tenths of the people of the earth are still living in 
the practice of cabalistic formulas ; and nine-tenths of the 
religion of the remaining tenth is actually and demon- 
strably cabala. The Free-mason reverences the gavel 
without knowing, until he reaches his highest initiations,' 
if he does then, that it represents the gibel or mountain 
form, and is therefore cabalistic. The Chancellor of 
England sits gravely on the awkward woolsack, without 
knowing that wool is the cabalistic symbol of water, and 
that he is Lord High Baron, because, like the bards and 
barons of Druid times, his place is at the summit of the 
bar or holy mountain. We all of us talk of monkeys 
gibbering, and idiots muttering gibberish, and turkeys 
gobbling, and school-girls gabbling, without a suspicion 
that these words date from the times when the language of 
the initiated was a mysterious, unintelligible cabala to the 
common people. The Frenchman calls his horse a cheval 
and the German calls his a gaul, without reference to the 
fact that the motion of the animal was recognized to be 
that of a ship on the waves, by those who first subjected 
it to the saddle, and at the same time cabalistically in- 
vented the fish-tail ed hippocamp to carry Neptune. And 
the same scorn of the tonsure is expressed to-day which 
prompted the boys to cry to Elisha, ' Go up, thou bald 
pate ! ' with the same ignorance that the circlet of hairj 
around the naked skull is the symbol of the Arkite water: 
around the naked mountain-top ; and therefore the French! 
word for hair is cheveux, capilli, i. e] the cabalistic sign of 
initiation into the priesthood. 



XI.] ON AUKITE SYMBOLISM. 339 

I cannot dismiss the subject without again reminding 
you that I have confined myself to only one train of analo- 
gies, that led off by the word TAB, TBE, or Thebes. I 
might have made the same use of any of the variant forms 
of Theb ; for instance, TOM ; * and shown you how it was 
represented by our tomb, and dome, and all that class of 
words; and their derivatives, the tabor and temple and 
devil symbols. Or I might have taken for my guide the 
word AE¥, which the Egyptians used to designate the 
oval or cartouche in which they placed a royal name, from 
which the Hebrews got their designation for the ark of the 
covenant, and the Latins their word urna with its depend- 
encies, as I have mentioned in my lecture upon archi- 
tecture, f 

Or I might have chosen the word BAR (or BAL) to be 
the clue through our Arkite labyrinth (with its compounds 
and contractions, kabar, caer, car, tabar, tower, tor, bark, 
bar't, cabark, kirk, &c, &<c.) as the fullest and richest of 
all, in traditional meaning. 

I might have shown you how these symbols were com- 
pounded to suit the needs which arose with schisms and 
heresies of all kinds, as the times rolled on, and under 
what strange disguises some of them have entered into the 
languages which men now speak. 

For instance, the heresy of Phallism, converting all the 
older Arkite symbols into illustrations of its own philo- 
sophical conceptions of the mystery of generation, gave to 
the various parts and members of the human body those 
names which constitute the special vocabulary of obscenity 
at the present day. It is only by reference to other Arkite 
symbols of the mountain-top — as standing above the waters 
constituting itself the new starting-point for life upon the 
planet — that we can solve that unsolved mystery of 
mysticism, circumcision, for which the Hebrew scriptures 
offers no explanation, and the practice of which has been 
pursued for ages far outside the limits of the Levitical in- 
fluence. But when the true key is given it is seen at once 
to be a precisely identical phenomenon with the tonsure of 
initiation, the tiara of the papacy, the ducal crown, the 

* T. 6. 3. DomKirche, T. 17. 35. 

f Bunsen, vol. i. p. 44. — Aaron, Mosss's brother. — "^l the tree of 
which idols were made, Isa. xliv. 14. 



340 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

university cap, and a thousand curious female head-dresses 
scattered about the world. 

Another curious region into which the study of this 
subject may be pushed, with the certainty of good results, 
is that of necromancy, rhabdomancy, geomancy, palmistry, 
as they still exist and drive nourishing trades among the 
ignorant and superstitious. It is easy to see that the 
Ophism or serpent-worship of the ancients was merely a 
one-sided Arkism, deifying the water symbols in an exag- 
gerated degree.* It is equally easy to show that the 
Yezidee, or devil-worship, was but a modification of 
Ophism, and was represented in Arkism by the worship of 
the Crocodile, and other amphibious or marine monsters, 
by the legends of Tannim, and the Typhon, and by the 
whole ceremonial of Sivaism, and was perpetuated in the 
bat-winged devil of Etruria, Japan, and the modern 
Miltonian orthodoxy. The half-philosophical discussion 
of the evils flesh is heir to has produced Ahrimanism, 
Manicheism, and Dualism in general, in all ages; but the 
special symbolic of demon- worship or diabolism has, 
nevertheless, always been essentially and plainly Arkite ; 
as may be seen in the tales of the Genii, the Talmud, and 
the Apocalypse of St John, as well as in the formulae of 
the necromancers. f 

One of the most interesting, if it be not in fact the most 
important field of investigation for the theory which I have 
developed in this lecture, is that remarkable system of re- 
ligious faith and practice which occupies so large a part of 

* See Dean Stanley's graphic description of the serpents in the tombs 
of the Vale of Kings, back of Thebes. The further you penetrate swarm 
jackal gods, monstrous genii, good and bad, the Goddess of Justice with 
her feather, barges carrying mummies over the lake, and more than all, 
everlasting convolutions of serpents, in every possible form and attitude, 
human-legged, human-handed, crowned, entwining mummies, enwreathing 
or embraced by processions extending down whole galleries, so that meet- 
ing the head of the serpent at the top of the staircase you have to descend 
to its very end before you reach his tail. (Sinai and Palestine, page 44. 
See also Jour., Feb. 5, 1867.) One of the most curious instances of this 
serpent-worship in Egypt is a picture of a serpent stretched at full length 
upon a boat, reaching nearly from the stem to the stern, and holding in 
its mouth, by the ring, the sign of life. It occupies the place due to 
Osiris. — See Appendix to p. 340. 

f On the mystical compounds of Bar, in the Proc. Amer. Philosoph. 
Soc, July 14, 1865. 



xi.] on aekite symbolism:. 341 

the continent of Asia, and is believed to be professed by 
a large majority of the whole human race, I mean the 
Buddhism of China and Thibet. This system when ex- 
amined is seen to be Arkite in the highest degree. It is 
no wild vagary of an excited fancy that allies two such ap- 
parently irrelevant trains of thought as those suggested 
by the hierarchy of the Grand Lama in his capital at 
Llassa, and the Apocalyptic 'Lamb in the midst of the 
throne " before whom the four-and-twenty elders and the 
hosts of the New Jerusalem fell down and worshipped. 
The very name of the most ancient capital of Arkism is 
still retained as the name of the central province of its 
latest and completest representation — TJiIEeT. We have 
little need to go back to its ancient records, we may study 
it here in all its details, developed to the highest pitch. 
And from this as a vital centre we may trace its radiating 
traditions and its proselyting ceremonials to the farthest 
limits of the East, throughout Mongolia, China, and Japan, 
amongst the Polynesian islands, to California, Mexico, 
and Peru. Everything grows clear, — the pagoda and its 
dragon — the Marai and its tabu — the shamanism of the 
northern zone — the teocallis of the New World. 

The Druidism of Europe, however, is only the western 
representation of the Lamaism of the East, which con- 
tinues to exist and develope its infinitely prolific germs 
of variation and transmutation in the Greek and Roman 
Churches of Christendom and in some of their Protestant 
offshoots. It is evident that the Legends of the Saints 
are to be rescued from contempt, and explained, only by 
reference to the spirit of Arkism, which has thoroughly 
and energetically inspired the Church of Christ ; inventing 
perpetually new dresses for the old symbols, and recom- 
mending them thereby to new classes of society, or to 
new sections of the heathen world. A perfect harmony 
can thus be established between the stories of the cloister 
and the sagas and folkslore of the hearth; between the 
mythical St Christopher and the equally mythical William 
Tell* 

* A Jesuit priest in the middle of the seventeenth century, published a 
pamphlet in Berne showing that no such person as Tell ever existed. He 
was driven from Switzerland for this offence. But the most laborious re- 
searches in the convent libraries of Switzerland have failed to afford the 



342 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

And this brings us to an astounding prospect — if our 
eyes be open. What is this new religion which is sweep- 
ing over Catholic Christendom like a storm of sand, ob- 
literating the old landmarks and sinking out of sight the 
temples built to Christ ? This worship of the Virgin 
Mary — what does it mean ? Half-educated preachers will 
give a commonplace and vulgar explanation of it. But 
they are schoolmasters, not savants. There must be some 
deep-seated cause for such a phenomenon — it must have 
its philosophical statement. Why does this new worship 
flourish in France and Spain and not in Bavaria, Austria, 
and Hungary ? — in the homes of the druidic Celts, but not 
in the habitat of the Sclavonic and Germanic races ? 

I answer : because this adoration of the Virgin Mary is 
no new mystery, but the revival of an always existing and 
most ancient system of religious ideas. The Virgin Mary, 
Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, Mater dolorosa, of the 
Bull of Pope Pius the Ninth, is identical with the Mary 
mother of Jesus in nothing but in name. In all other re- 
spects she is the Venus- Astarte-Isis of the old mythologies. 
Nay, in name also, — for she is the /3apt or sacred ark of 
Osiris itself. A thousand circumstaritial coincidences go 
to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the ark was 
regarded as a virgin mother of the Noah, the first and 
greatest of the gods. In all nations, in all religions, the 
myth of the man-child born of a virgin keeps alive this 
tradition of the ark, and fresh humanity. She is wor- 
shipped on the first of May, when the leaves grow' green 
and the rose-buds swell and the birds'-nests fill with,-egg's! 
In Eome she is the old Bgeria. In Spain they seat a young 
girl dressed in white upon a throne and seek about her for 
Maia, the ancient heathen tutelary deity of sailors. Upon 
the Ehone the young girl still retains the name of Maia. 
In England the Queen of May and the dance about the 
pole are inseparable traditions. In Languedoc they sing 
strange verses which will well repay grave study. On every 

slightest evidence of the existence of Tell's family or person ; the list of 
Austrian governors preserved at Vienna does not include the name of 
Gesler ; the Scandinavians have a precisely similar legend; the history of 
Switzerland shows that its independence was the work of the nobles and 
not of the peasantry ; and the whole story of the apple, coupled with the 
name of Tell, has a purely Arkite look. 



XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 343 

hill-top looking out upon the sea c Our lady of good suc- 
cour ' has a shrine of pilgrimage for sailors safely come to 
port, or for wives when tempests howl across the sea. No 
one can stand upon the rocky summit of the Marie de la 
Garde overlooking the ancient Phoc8ean seaport of Mar- 
seilles, and watch the pilgrims toiliug up those steps worn 
in the rock by millions upon millions of praying feet, with- 
out a complete conviction taking possession of his soul 
that this has been a shrine of prayer to some more ancient 
Mary than her who suckled the infant Jesus only eighteen 
hundred years ago. Nor will the traveller find this con- 
viction lessen when he perceives that the most famous 
images of the Virgin Mary, like those in the Crypt at 
Chartres and the monastery at Einsiedlen, are black, and 
very old — and that the local tradition assigns to them a 
heathen or Druidic origin. We need not be shocked at 
the coincidence of Jesus' mother bearing this aboriginal 
Arkite name, for it had become by that time widely spread 
as a proper name for women, not only among the Hebrews 
but elsewhere. But when we meet with it in what seems 
otherwise like fable, for instance, in the Maia Virgin 
mother of the Hindu Crishna, and in Miriam the motherly 
sister of Moses, we have a right to add it to our list of 
ancillary Arkisms. 

Still, all this opens up a grave subject for discussion, 
and one which I desire to state in such a way as may least 
offend weak consciences. The question is, how far this 
Arkite superstition can be traced backwards in Christianity 
towards its starting-point ? To what extent the pristine 
Arkism of the more ancient world, appearing and reappear- 
ing through preceding ages, Proteus-like, in many forms 
of worship and systems of philosophy, appeared once more 
in Christianity ? 

Many an ardent disciple of Jesus Christ has come to feel 
that there is something in the Gospels that he cannot com- 
prehend, — a certain element of the traditional mixed in 
with the great history of that Redemption. And that this 
slumbering sentiment can be awaked in many hearts is 
proved by the immense reception of such books as the 
Ecce Homo, the Vie de Jesus, and the Characterbild Jesu, 
within the last four years. Nor can the utmost pressure 
of that pillow of Orthodoxy stifle this innocent Desdemona. 



344 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [ LECT - 

We must know. We must invent some sieve to winnow 
out the chaff — if chaff there be — from the all-precious wheat 
of our dear faith, from which that bread is made of which 
if a man eat he shall never die. These literalists that 
thunder from our pulpits are stupid or crazy Grahamites, 
pretending that the husks are needful for our weak di- 
gestion. 

Will such a theory as this which I have tried to formu- 
late before you this evening — will this old Arkite system 
of ideas serve us for a sieve ? I am afraid to specify 
such items of the gospel history as the walking of Jesus 
on the water, the sinking of Peter when he tried to do the 
same, the appearance of Noah's dove at John's baptism of 
Jesus, the curious triplicity of Peter, James, and John, and 
the re-appearance of Jannes and Jambres in the names of 
John and James ; the selection of Peter as the one on whom 
the Church was to be built, &c, &c; because they seem 
such integral parts of the history. But when we come to 
the lesser writings of the years subsequent to the Master's 
disappearance, I have no hesitation in calling such a story 
as that of Peter's vision, recounted in the Acts, an Arkite 
myth. Why should a sheet, filled with as various a multi- 
tude of living things as that which the ark of Noah is said 
to have contained, be let down out of heaven precisely upon 
this apostle's head, and on no other, unless it were because 
by name he typified the Ararat ? • Nor can I view in any 
other light such an allusion as that which Jude makes to 
the contention between Michael and the Devil for the body 
of Moses which was buried by Jehovah on the top of 
Pisgah. Still less hesitation can I feel in handling with 
the freest criticism such an evident mythical rhapsody as 
the Apocalypse, ascribed by the fathers to St John, — mag- 
nificent and touching as it is, — full of sublime reinforce- 
ments for the spirits of the persecuted saints, and of the 
heartiest warnings and persuasions for us all to-day. 

But how can the discoveries of truth hurt such a book ? 
Nothing has so completely damaged its authority even with 
the orthodox doctors of the Protestant Communions, as 
the apparent impossibility of clearing up its meaning, or 
of detecting the source of that element of the enthusiastic 
and bizarre, which overshadows all its beauties and sublim- 
ities to so many earnest Christian minds. Looked at, how- 



XI.] ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. 345 

ever, from the stand-point I have taken, this book assumes 
a reasonable shape ; its fancifulnesses regulate themselves ; 
there is meaning in its symbols ; they were comprehended 
in the early centuries of the Christian era. If we have 
lost these mystical traditions, we may recover them ; I 
have tried to show you how. Look at that marvellous 
picture with which the Apocalyptic writer opens the 
twelfth chapter of his immortal drama : — ' And there ap- 
peared a great wonder in heaven ; a woman clothed with 
the sun, and the moon under her feet [as in the Virgin of 
Murillo in the Louvre], and a crown of twelve stars upon 
her head; and she being with child cried, travailing in 
birth, and pained to be delivered. And there appeared 
another wonder in heaven ; and behold a great red dragon 
. . . stood before the woman ... to devour her child as 
soon as it was born. And she brought forth a man child 
. . . and her child was caught up unto God and to his 
throne ; and the woman fled (with wings) into the wilder- 
ness. . . . and Michael and his angels fought against the 
dragon . . . and the serpent cast oat of his mouth a flood 
of water after the woman that he might cause her to be 
carried away of the flood ; and the earth helped the woman 
and opened its mouth and swallowed up the flood . . ' 
Let what interpretation you please be given to the body of 
this complicated metaphor — let the woman be the Christian 
Church, and the dragon the Roman government, and the 
flood its persecuting violence, and the helping earth society 
at large, with all its remedial influences and spiritual 
necessities — I have nothing to urge against it. But I 
maintain that the principal details of the dress in which 
the metaphor flashed splendidly before the inspired writer, 
and appeals for sympathy and admiration to ourselves, is a 
dress borrowed from the universal Arkite sentiment of the 
pre-Christian and pre- Judaic mythology, a sentiment which 
still found ample opportunities for gratifying all its cher- 
ished traditionary ideas in every kind of organization whether 
of the heathen priesthoods or the Christian heresies. 

Therefore it lives to-day. And precisely' by the secret 
masonic order of the Jesuits devoted to the Papacy is it 
reinaugurated and rehabilitated in this revival of the wor- 
ship of the Queen of Heaven, the Mary of the Moon. 
How far the wide-spread organization of Free-masonry 



346 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

conceals for its higher initiations, knights templars and 
what not, the traditions of the ancient creed, I do not 
know ; for I am not a mason. But this I am quite sure 
of, that Free-masonry must offer to its initiated another field 
for investigating living Arkism. Its gavel and trowel are 
sacred symbols of the mountain; and its other insignia, 
the square and the compasses, are equally easy to read in 
the light of architectural mysticism. Its primeval grand- 
master, Solomon, the Man of the Cell, called himself the 
QELT (nbtip) or Cabalist.* Many branches of Free- 
Masonry have been produced in the course of ages, known 
by different names, and various in spirit, language, and 
rites, according to the temper of the times, the blood of 
the members, and the progress of ideas. But so far as 
their interior history has ever been revealed, the revelation 
has exposed the elements of Arkism as the stuff of which 
originally their essence was composed. No phenomenon 
connected with the existence of man has excited more 
curiosity and speculation than the universal spread of not 
only the spirit, but the language of Free-masonry around 
the world. It can only be explained by reference to the 
simplicity of its formularies, and their preservation from 
the remotest antiquity, as modern representatives of pri- 
meval Arkism. 

And now if Arkism can do something like this service 
for religion, what can it do for science ? If it does nothing 
but sweep away the rubbish of geographical and historical 
names which encumber the study of the habitats and 
migrations of races it will have done much. If it does but 
wipe off from the solid body of human zoological research 
that cracked and dingy varnish of traditional philology, it 
will give us a chance to see a picture which ethnology can 
then describe. If it only teaches us one truth — that the 
names of nations are not names of country or of race, but 
names of worship — it will at all events prepare our way to 
take up the whole subject of race afresh, unfettered by 
prejudice, with no old Hebrew t Greek, and Latin scales 
upon our eyes. 

* QEL, sTlp, ticicXrjaia, kirk, church s as well as the verbs which cor- 
respond to them, and from which they are commonly supposed to be 
derived, viz. snp, tcaXeo), select, collect, &c, find their explanation in 

the Arkite-Cabala. 



XI.] ON ARXITE SYMBOLISM. 347 

This Arkism will do, I think. It will explain how the 
priesthoods of the BAB,, the TAB, the TOE, the GEL, 
bestowed these names not only on the symbols and idols 
that they worshipped, but on all things and persons attach- 
ed to those worships, on the priesthoods themselves, and 
on the nations who adopted them. Thus were these sacred 
epithets transferred from thing to thing, from man to man, 
from place to place, from age to age, until one universal 
Arkite nomenclature penetrated everywhere, preceding 
and underlying others that came afterwards. There 
could, therefore, be Tar- tars worshipping the Tor in 
Siberia, and Berbers worshipping the Bar in the Sahara ; 
Chaldees or Mithraic Celts in Armenia and Galatia, and 
Culdees or Christian Celts in Scotland; Iberians in the 
Caucasus as well as in Spain; Germani in Europe, Cara- 
manians in Asia, Garamantes in Africa, all of them of dif- 
ferent stocks, but worshipping in common the Cser of 
Mannus ; Persia, and Prussia, and Paris, and the innu- 
merable Bars and Berris in France and Italy, Britain and 
Burgundy, and a thousand other derivatives of the original 
worship of the Bar.* I take these names at haphazard, 
not to assert anything respecting the true etymology of 
any single one of them taken by itself, but simply to show 
the kind of thought, the run of the argument, suggested 
to us by the question : What can Arkism do for science ? 
I feel sure, however, that the greater part of all geographi- 
cal names carry traditions of religious foundations, emigra- 
tions, feuds, heresies, and fresh developments of mystic 
and philosophic thought. I am quite certain that such 
much-disputed names as Celt and Scyth are essentially 
religious and not political denominations : and the bearing 
of all this on the science of ethnology I need not stop at 
this late hour to expatiate upon.f 

* The ship which one sees on the coat lappets of the government 
officials in Paris was the ancient sign or totem of the place in Druid days. 
The Isle de la Cite sacred to the worship of Notre Dame, was the shrine of 
Isis, the baris or sacred bark of Osiris. The Celtic god was Hesus. 

f Others are coming or have come to the same conclusion. I see in 
an extract from the Ausland, one of the best periodicals of Germany, an 
account of Dr Ludwig's paper on the aboriginal history of Mexico, trans- 
lated by Dr Andree of Bremen, in which the learned author ' seeks to 
establish new and interesting views of the migrations and names of the 
Tulteks, Chichimeks, and Aztecs, which names he considers rather as 



348 ON AEKITE SYMBOLISM.' [lECT. 

A few more words and I have done.* ' So wide a general- 
ization of facts from all departments of history in the 
past, and human life in the present, centred upon so small 
a group of facts as that which has been described above, 
under the name of the Arkite symbol of the mountain, 
ship, and water, will necessarily incur the charge of one- 
sidedness. The theory will be said to attempt too much, 
to run itself into the ground, to break down with its own 
weight. It will find arrayed against itself other theories 
of primeval history, laboriously invented by the best think- 
ers of the last hundred years, each claiming to explain the 
rise and development of human thought and culture, as 
well as most of the anomalous and eccentric, fantastic and 
absurd, misapplications of men's views of the super- 
natural and of nature. Of no part of science is it a 
truer saying than of this, that no theory can be true that 
does not accept, ally, and illustrate, all that is true in all 
other theories ; embodying their generalizations within its 
own, and differing from them only in the superior expan- 
siveness of its field of vision. Modern geology is neither 
Huttonism nor Wernerism, but an eclectic combination of 
both. Sociology, as now best taught, recognizes the just- 
ness of every form of government in its natural place. 
The science of physics is a compound precipitate from the 
relation of the most prosy parts of materialistic natural 
history, and the finest transcendental or metaphysical 
notions respecting essence, and the mysterious forces of 
the entire universe. Even theology is being stimulated 
from its sleep of ages by stimulants administered by un- 
believing savans. Isolation is no longer possible for the 
investigator ; and his theories must be in good society, or 
be tabooed. 

Archseology has been based exclusively on Astrology 
by some of its best writers. Undoubtedly there is a 
department of astronomical archaeology; and the genius 

political denominations (like nobility, people, priests), than as designa- 
tions of distinct nationalities. . . . The Aztecs Mr L. considers as a 
caste of priests,' &c. Confined as snch an opinion is to a verysmall 
locality, it makes a sensible addition to a broader statement which is 
intended to cover the entire world. 

* The following paragraphs are reproduced from the notice before 
quoted, in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, July, 
1865. 



XI.] ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. 349 

and learning displayed in such a masterpiece as Dupuis' 
great work were far from being thrown away. On the 
contrary,, it is as much a cabinet of new-discovered facts 
and truths, as Boucher des Perthes' Celtic Remains, or 
Tyndall's Lectures on Heat. But it does not follow from 
all the wonderful coincidences between mythologies and 
the phenomena of the sky, that the aboriginal mythology 
was astronomical. Man's eyes were early dazzled by the 
light of the sun, and his heart melted by the beauty of the 
moon ; but an earlier worship may have existed for his 
soul, and centuries of intellectual development may have 
been needed before the order of the stars could take so 
strong a hold upon his imagination, as to subjugate his 
reverence, and systematize his hopes and fears into the 
Mithraic and Sabasan forms. Some wider synthesis must 
include Dupuis. The very nomenclature of sun and planet 
worship requires an older worship for its explanation ; so 
does its architecture; so does its symbolism. The ring, 
the bird's tail, the carpet of Mithras, in conjunction, find 
no account of themselves in astronomy. Fire-vforship was 
evidently adopted and carried in arms by an older moun- 
tain-worship. If the great triliths of Stonehenge have 
their tops cut down to the plane of the ecliptic, the central 
sacrificial stone, sloped for the draining off of human 
blood, is a structure suggestive of quite a different system 
— that of the Arkite loggan and ambrose stones of the 
whole Druid world. Supposing Turner's views respecting 
the great pyramid to have been made mathematically cer- 
tain by the memoir of the Astronomer-Royal of Scotland, 
Turner himself insists that the great pyramid differs from 
all other pyramids, in Egypt and elsewhere, in this very 
fact, that it alone is astronomical ; the rest must give some 
other account of themselves. Arkism embraces and ex- 
plains astronomical archaeology, but the latter cannot 
explain the former. 

Then there is the Phallic system of Kanne, and all 
the learned writers of that school. A theory of antiquity 
not to be despised — a grand summary of indubitable facts 
— it has a philosophical basis to stand upon. It has im- 
mense resources in philology. It is written with the freest 
and coarsest hand on the monuments of east and west. It 
explains, and is explained by, the experiences of monastic 



350 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

life. It appeals for justification, in fact, to the strongest 
of all the energies of nature, both physical and spiritual, 
when it affirms that the first astonishment man felt was at 
himself when he began to cohabit with woman ; and the 
second, at the birth of his first child ; that thus all worship 
sprang from love, and all its symbols from the organs of 
reproduction ; replaced afterwards by such objects of nature 
as mountains, caverns, and seas, for grandeur's sake. If, 
however, the nomenclature, the architecture, and the 
ritual of Phallism can be shown to have had an anterior 
existence, unmodified by the gross sentiments of animal 
love, and to be explainable on a hypothesis, .not personal 
to the individual man, but common to mankind, then the 
Phallic theory, like the astronomical, must take a secondary 
rank, and be accepted only for what it is worth within its 
just limits ; while its formal origin and outer development 
will be referable to that older and more general Arkism, 
whose language it had adopted, whose symbols it had 
modified, whose truths it had degraded, whose pure and 
simple worship it had debased and defiled, but still con- 
tinued to illustrate. 

The Ophite theory is considered, by the authors of 
such books as the" Serpent Symbol," all sufficient to account 
for the prehistoric religious history of man. This seems to 
be a most presumptuous supposition. The theory has to 
do with no grand event in history, which might be sup- 
posed to have made an indelible impression upon the life 
of mankind ; nor with any general idea of the sublime or 
terrible, germain to worship ; nor to any master sentiment 
of the human heart, — for fear is not so strong as love, nor 
so instructive as curiosity, nor so inventive as taste. The 
theory involves a mere classification of one kind of archae- 
ological facts, requiring the simplest treatment, and barren 
of all results but one, namely, a certain addition to the 
mass of evidence, otherwise collected, that some myste- 
rious Arkite intercourse has had existence between all the 
known races of the world. Beyond this, Ophism has no 
story to tell ; and instead of elucidating antiquity, adds to 
its confused obscurity. But Ophism is one of the great 
facts of history, notwithstanding; and enters not only 
largely but naturally into the composition of the Arkite 
theory, which fully unfolds it, suggesting for its existence 



XI.] ON AEEITE SYMBOLISM. 351 

a new and satisfactory cause, and explaining all its forms 
and variations perfectly. 

Then there is the great archaeological problem of Devil- 
worship, for so many portions of mankind, the terrors 
of shamanism, the darker or fearful side of fetichism, 
all so nearly allied to serpent-worship, and all so nearly 
explainable by reference merely to the limitations of 
human will and human happiness, but none of them quite 
so. What shall be done with the unexplained residuum ? 
Archaeology claims it; but which archaeological theory 
shall take charge of it ? Certainly none of these theories 
of departments, departmental theories, — we need the new 
name, — already alluded to. No. To learn the language 
of Fear-worship, we must go back to the very beginning ; 
to some age of weakness, calamity, and fright ; to some 
irruption of wild beasts, or conflagration, or deluge ; to 
some event so overwhelming that it could impress no less 
than all mankind, for a time no less than all the ages, the 
memory of which would be a simple figure of destruction 
and salvation combined, the symbol of which would be the 
intertwined names of God and the Devil. In the moun- 
tain and the ship, which rescued mankind from destruction 
in that event, we have the explanation of the origin of all 
Phallism and Egg- worship. In the waters which came so 
near destroying him, we have the explanation of the origin 
of all Ophism and Devil-worship. Both were made ornate 
in the tasteful idolatry of Greece, scientific on the clear- 
eyed mountain-land of Persia, and spiritual among the 
justice-loving seers of Palestine. Before Arkism, of 
course, was universal fetichism, like a great chaos, without 
law, or any method of self-expression ; and after Arkism 
came all forms of thought and feeling possible for man to 
invent, but all budding from this Yggdrasil, and bearing 
flowers and fruit after the pattern of its undying life. 

It is not, therefore, in violation of the great canon of 
modern science, but in obedience to it, that the Arkite 
theory sets up its claims to universality. 

What the great event was which so -impressed the 
worshipful mind of the human race, or whether the chronic 
relationships of mankind in the earlier stages of their ex- 
istence to mountains, or firm land in general, to boats, 
rafts, or stationary crannoges, and to all waters in general, 



352 ON ARKITE SYMBOLISM. [LECT. 

may not compensate for the doubt which physical science 
cannot help throwing over the story of a Noachian deluge, 
— it will be hard to demonstrate. Geological investigation 
has as yet discovered no traces of a real event, such as is 
described in Mosaic and other records of the barbarous 
ages of the world. That science, however, has long taught 
the alternate submergence and emergen ce of dry land; 
and all its latest teachings are of the extreme antiquity of 
human life upon the earth, and of man's contemporaneous 
existence with other now extinct animals, during a glacial' 
epoch, involving probably great floods, and opening into 
the comparatively modern age at the beginning of which 
men lived upon the waters, instead of on the land. The 
Arkite theory has nothing to say on these matters. It 
starts from a given point, the already established worship 
of the mountain, ship, and flood, without explaining how 
this worship was begotten ; only denying that it was de- 
veloped intellectually out of Fetichism, Ophism, Mithraism, 
Phallism, or any other known mythology ; and affirming, 
on the contrary, that it explains and embraces them/ 






APPENDIX. 



Appendix to page 12. 

CLASSIFICATION OE THE SCIENCES. 

I. General Sciences : — 

1. Philosophy. 2. Bibliography. 
II. Mathematical Sciences : — 

1. Mathematics. 2. Astronomy. 3. Meteorology. 4. Geodesy. 
5. Geography. 6. Physics, leading to the 

III. Inorganic Sciences : — 

1. Chemistry. 2. Mineralogy. 3. Metallurgy. 4. Geology. 
5. Palaeontology, leading to the 

IV. Organic Sciences : — 

1. Biology. 2. Botany. 3. Zoology. 4. Medicine, leading 
to the group of the 
Y. Historical Sciences: — 

1. Chronology. 2. Mythology. 3. Archaeology. 4. Ethnology. 
5. History, leading to the 

VI. Social Sciences : — 

1. Sociology or Statistics. 2. Manufacture, o. Commerce. 
4. Defence. 5. Equity, leading to the 

VII. Intellectual Sciences : — 

1. Language. 2. Belles Lettres. 3. Eine Arts. 4. Meta- 
physics. 5. Education. 6. Philanthropy. 7. Worship. 
VIII. Personal Science : — 
1. Biography. 



Appendix to page 34. 

Star. It is remarkable, however, that the star so persistently -worship- 
ped by men kneeling in little dishes, on the columns of the XIX. Dynasty 
temple at Abydos, is always five-pointed, and made by the meeting, not 
of five triangles at their bases, but of five plain bars or spokes ; and that 

23 



354 APPENDIX. 

the top one is always upright, while the two lower ones form two straddling 
legs. The remaining two are in their places so as to divide the circle into 
five equal segments. But there are instances on the monuments where 
these last two arms form a continuous bar across the apex of the two legs ; 
and then the symbol approximates the form of the sign of life. See Ap- 
pendix to page 236, below. 

Appendix to the last paragraph on page 120. 

The latest important discovery bearing upon the theoretical relation- 
ship of man to the quadrumana has been made by M. Edouard Dupont, 
to whom the Belgian Government has confided the task of continuing the 
researches of Dr Schmerling in the cave and soil deposits of the Meuse. 
M. Dupont had examined (up to August of 1866) twenty-four caverns 
situated on the banks of the Lesse, an affluent of the Meuse, in the 
neighbourhood of Dinant. 

The quaternary deposits of this region are thus classified : — 

1. Siliceous (90 per cent, silex) greyish-yellow brick-clay; 'loess/ 

2. Yellow clay with angular pieces of local rocks ; ' block clay ; ' at the 
base of which are found remains of reindeer. 

3. Sand, with subdivisions of gravel, containing human remains (the 
oldest found as yet), and supporting a stratum of sandy clay, with cal- 
careous concretions ; ' lehm.' 

4. Rolled stones, with intercalated lens-shaped layers of sand. Then 
follows floor of rock, of various geological antiquity, which has furnished 
the angular pieces of the block clay. 

Of these four quaternary deposits, No. 3 has repaid the researches of 
M. Dupont with a very remarkable human jaw, which he exhibited at the 
International Palseontological Congress at Neufchatel in August of 1866, 
and was described by him as having been found in a cavern called the 
Trou de la Naulette, in the left bank of the Lesse, 80 feet above the 
river bed, — in the back part of the cave, under a covering of ten alternate 
layers of stalagmite and clay, — in a layer of sand, and in company with a 
cubitus of an individual of small stature, a fragment of bone pierced by 
the hand of man, and numerous bones of animals : marmot, mammoth, 
rhinoceros, reindeer, chamois, &c. 

The alternate layers of sand and clay and stalagmite, which form the 
floor of the cave, belong to formation No. 3. The block clay formation 
No. 2, which, outside the cave, upon a natural terrace in front of its 
mouth, is 10 feet thick, thins so rapidly inwards, that not a trace of it is 
to be found four paces from the mouth. This block clay yields here bones 
of the horse, reindeer, &c. 

The Naulette jaw has a very remarkable shape. All the teeth, the 
vertical branches, and the hind part of the right horizontal branch, as far 
as to the second pre-molar, are wanting, the residue is in excellent pre- 
servation, even to the walls of the alveoles. Looked at in front, this jaw 
does not possess those little well-pronounced details, which commonly 
mark the insertions of the muscles. The whole is smooth and rounded. 
The chin region itself is vertical, or rather retires upward, without, how- 
ever, making it certain that the chin was prominent. Moreover, the 



APPENDIX. 355 

horizontal branches, as well as the chin, have an exceptional thickness, 
that is, relatively to the feeble elevation of these branches, so that it seems 
as if there were a kind of balance between the thickness and the height 
of the bone. 

Looked at from behind, it offers such a proclivity from behind forwards 
of the parts about the symphysis, that one is obliged to remark a prog- 
nathism entirely animal. The apophyses are not indicated, the lateral 
fossae are well pronounced, and the rim of the chin is reduced to its 
minimum. 

Seen from above, this jaw confirms, by the disposition of the sockets, 
the impression produced by its prognathism ; the sockets of the eye-teeth, 
although very close to the sockets of the incisors and the molars, remind 
us of the disposition of the teeth in the jaw of the monkey. In effect, 
the socket of the eye-tooth is very vast, and bulges on the external face. 
But what seems still more strange is, that the three sockets of the great 
molars absolutely present the typical order of the monkey jaw, the third 
socket being greater than the second, and the second than the first. The 
socket of the wisdom-tooth shows the print of five roots; finally, the 
socket of the second pre-molar has an oblique direction. 

It is impossible to mistake (as Professor Vogt remarked after the read- 
ing of the memoir) the singular importance attaching to this relic of the 
human frame. Judging by the connection of the teeth, the jaw is 
entirely human ; there does not exist the least interruption of continuity, 
not the smallest space between the eye-teeth and the molars and 
incisors. But, on the other hand, the fact that the molars augment in 
size backward instead of forward is a most curious feature. In the 
human jaw the first molar' is the largest, and the wisdom-tooth the 
smallest and often entirely wanting. The absence of the apophyses 
(geni) is also very strange. As for the chin itself, it is intermediate in 
type between that of the man and that of the monkey, being vertical ; 
whereas that of man advances, while that of the monkey retreats, or is 
completely effaced. 

Besides this remarkable jaw from the third quaternary deposit of the 
age of the mammoth, Monsieur Dupont presented at the same time a 
second human jaw, very different from the first, possessing none of its 
peculiarities, and of a much later age, although still of high antiquity, for 
it was imbedded in the deposit No. 2, that of the reindeer age. It was 
found in one of the grottoes of Furfoos, called the Trou du Frontal, the 
galleries of which have served for a graveyard, and contained when 
examined a quantity of human bones, related to 13 skeletons, disseminated 
irregularly through the stalagmite and coarse mud. Near these bones 
were found twenty flint knives, many fossil shells, pierced for suspension 
as an ornament, and a hand-made urn of very rude pottery. A great slab 
of dolomite was found buried in the clay near the mouth of the grotto, 
and no doubt once served as a door. The block clay just inside the open 
mouth of the grotto, and in front of this door, contained fractured bones 
of reindeer, brown bear, chamois, beaver, horse, &c, mixed with thousands 
of flint chips. Broken for their marrow, these bones all bore the trace of 
fire. Among these animals thus used for food, were foxes, horses, and 
water-rats in abundance. The human bones inside the cave exhibited no 
mark of fire or of fracture. 



356 APPENDIX. 

This cave of the age of the reindeer is a case, therefore, of the same 
kind with that of the grotto of Aurignac, which is however immensely 
older, belonging as it does to the age of the great cave bear. 

Monsieur Dupont has found the succeeding age of polished stones also 
represented in one only of these caves (Pont a Lesse). No reindeer 
remains are seen here. The men of the later epoch fed upon the wild 
boar, the goat, the stag, and the water-rat ; but not upon the horse. The 
presence of some human bones belonging to a youth, mixed in with those 
of animals used for food, would lead to the suspicion of cannibalism, were 
it not that these human bones were neither broken intentionally nor 
marked with fire. 

In one other cave, however (Trou des Nutons de Gendron). and in a 
layer of earth above formation No. 2 above, he found the bones belonging 
to 17 skeletons, all of them broken, but so arranged that the fragments 
of head, then those of the trunk and arms, then those of the legs, were 
met with successively in a space of seven feet. He then found a second, 
a third, and then a fourth range of three incomplete skeletons. The first 
range contained only two. After the fourth a little skeleton was placed 
transversely. Then the longitudinal arrangement was resumed with two 
skeletons, the heads towards the mouth of the cave. Then came another 
little transverse skeleton. Finally, two more longitudinal skeletons. At 
the entrance was found a little flint flake and three pieces of coarse 
pottery. 

Appendix to page 136. 

The distinguished secretary of the Royal Geographical Society con- 
siders it an historical fact that the great movements of the Tartar race in 
the 12th century, under Togrul Beg Genghis Khan and other chiefs, 
keeping Asia in disturbance for several generations, among other results 
had the effect of pressing upon the Siberian aborigines belonging to the 
Circumpolar race, forcing them to migrate beyond Behring Straits as far 
as the western coast of Greenland, at that time occupied by 300 farms and 
villages of northmen, who had settled there under Eric the Red, at the 
end of the 10th century, all of whom these invading Esquimaux destroyed. 
He depends for his theory, that these Norsemen were not pirates but 
settlers in Greenland, upon the proof afforded by Runic inscriptions, and 
the existence of stone-dwellings and churches in ruins, furnished with 
large bells, and almost magnificent enough to be styled cathedrals. An 
east and west belt across Siberia and North America of ruined stone- 
dwellings, in which are found bones of animals cut with flint instruments, 
&c, he thinks were the successive halting-places of the great Siberian mi- 
gration, Mr Markham says that the appearance of the hostile strangers in 
Greenland took place suddenly in the middle of the 14th century, with- 
out boats ; and therefore it must have come from the north by land and not 
across from Labrador, where Esquimaux are known to have been settled 
in the 10th century. The ruined Yourts still found on Cape Chelagskoi, 
in northern Siberia, mark the commencement of the long march, which 
must have been accomplished by following some unknown polar lands, 
such as those high mountain-lands reported to Admiral Wrangell north 



APPENDIX. 357 

of Cape Chelagskoi, and seen by Admiral Kellett N. and N.W. of Behring 
Straits. (Proc. R. G. Soc. ix. p. 88.) Mr Lubbock, president of the 
Ethnological Society and a higher authority in such matters, opposes Mr 
Markham's views, with a theory more in accordance with all the known 
facts. He considers the Lapland or Siberian race as the aboriginal race 
of Europe, driven northward by the Celts and Teutons ; as the American- 
Siberians or Esquimaux seem to have been driven northward by the more 
powerful Red Indian. He does not credit the assertion that' Greenland 
was empty at the coming of the Norsemen ; nor that miserable Skrcelling 
immigrants could drive off Icelanders ; nor did he think, with Kane, that 
the Arctic highlanders were a race in process of extinction (p. 102). Mr 
Crawfurd doubts the whole history of the Norse settlements of the 9th 
century, and ascribes the Runic inscriptions to the occasional visits of 
pirates, but he could not explain the bells ; he considered Greenland 
always inhabited by Esquimaux, and that these were not of Asiatic origin 
(pp. 102, 103). _ 

Mr Owen beljeves that the study of the Esquimaux will give us our 
best ideas of the life of the aboriginal inhabitants — the cave-dwellers— of 
Europe (p. 100). 

The Esquimaux at the mouth of Mackenzie river and round fort Ander- 
son or Anderson river, sleep naked between deer-skins, and prefer cooked 
food, although they occasionally eat raw meat and frequently raw fish. 
Before leaving the river (Nov. 30) for their winter homes on the coast 
east of the Anderson inlet, many of them make large caches of deer-meat 
secured in the ice upon the river, against their return in April ; the ani- 
mals beginning to go north in May. When the ice goes off the men hunt 
reindeer on the slopes and summits of the river-bank and float the car- 
case (buoyed by an arrow) down to the fort. Later they spear the rein- 
deer as they cross the river; one expert canoe-man will spear 50 at a 
time. These Esquimaux are peaceable and fast improving; they buy 
guns and ammunition, are excessively fond of tobacco, and use kettles, 
steel-traps, wolverines, knives, files, blankets, the flint and steel now in- 
stead of the fire-producer. They also work well in parties with the Hud- 
son Bay Indians farther south. Their game consists of five kinds of fox, 
two bears, a few beavers, very few lynx, musks, martens, musquash, 
wolves, swan, and a few musk oxen, which last are pretty numerous S.E. 
of them. (Mc Farlane, to the R. Geog. Soc, March, 1865, p. 130.) 

The Esquimaux of the Labrador coast in 1864 (discovered by Cabot in 
1497) consisted only of 200 individuals chiefly living near Esquimaux Bay, 
or Hamilton Inlet. There are 1600 British colonists. In the interior there 
are ' mountaineers,' a branch of the Creek Indians ( ? ), scattered tribes. 
At the August fair, on Esquimaux Bay, you may see the birch canoe and 
seal-skin boat side by side. The Esquimaux are more cleanly than the 
British settler, live in nice houses, with well-stocked English cottage- 
looking dressers, and little ornaments ; they wear the English dress, and 
are invariably Protestants. In 1864, 60 Hudson Bay Bed Indians 
crossed the Straits of Belleisle and anxiously asked if Micmacs were there, 
saying that they were bad Indians, and that their own hunting-grounds 
were exhausted, and 300 of their tribe would like to settle in Newfound- 
land. Their fear of Micmacs was hereditary, because their Bed ancestry 
had been exterminated by the inferior Micmacs when the English settlers 



358 APPENDIX. 

gave the latter guns. Micmacs and mountaineers are invariably Catholics. 
(Cap. Hamilton, Proc. R, G. Soc, March, 1865, p. 133.) 

Mr O'Callaghan (in the Proc, Geo. and Pol. Soc, W. R. of Yorkshire, 
1863-4, p. 312) says that the ancient Britons, previous to or during the 
Stone period, buried their fat and butter in wooden vessels in bogs. ' The 
peat-moss seems to have been used as a cellar or larder before the dis^ 
covery of the curative property of salt, or even of its existence in this 
country ; for the Greek historians tell us that salt was one of the imported 
articles used in barter for the native metals*' ' Butter, cheese, and tallow 
are frequently found sunk deep in Irish bogs, sometimes in large masses, 
converted into a sort of stearine, although generally every particle of the 
wooden vessel which contained the substance has utterly disappeared.' 
Wilson, quoting Train for a ball of fat or bannock of tallow, weighing 
127 lbs.., found in a peat-moss, says that it indicated the spot where some 
large animal had perished (Prehistoric Annals of Scot., p. 31), This is 
absurd enough. 



Appendix to page 171. 

JBarzil, Hebrew name for iron. Selas, a stone, is probably the second 
syllable. The first syllable occurs in the name of the mythological 
inventor of metallurgy, Tubalcain. The Tu of this name is a prefix, as 
we see from its Roman form, Vulcan. The Cain is equally a separate 
syllable from the Bal (Bar) as we see from its separate existence in other 
proper names, as Cain, the son of Adam, Cainan the grandson of Noah, 
&c. It is undoubtedly the Hebrew word CEN, cohen, a priest. Cain 
offered the first bloody sacrifice of fire upon an altar, according to the 
Hebrew tradition. Vulcan means, then, priest of the Bal (Bar) ; and 
Tubalcain, priest of the Tabal (Tabor) ; the Greeks reversed the order of 
the syllables and said Centaur. Every epithet connected with this 
important manufacture reveals some Arkism. The hammer is a cabar or 
cabalistic thing, sacred to the mountain, tor, the god Thor. It was 
carried by all the deities of Etruria. The anvil is an om-bar, the very 
form of which reproduces the ship-mountain symbol. The Greek name 
for iron, sideron, means 'that which belongs to the sacred tor' (s-tor-n). 
Ferrum, in Latin, is the reverse of Om-bar ; or is simply bar, with a 
neuter noun-sign like the final ma of Greek substantives. 

One of the most curious circumstances connected with the discoveries 
of the bronze age, is a fact made plain by the researches of Dr F. Wibel. 
(Die Cultur der Bronzezeit, Kiel, 1865, p. 24, quoted in Die Pfahlbauten 
des Neuenbergen Sees von E. Desor. Erankfurt am Main, 1866, page 
75.) The art of tempering bronze seems to have been known to the pre- 
historic smiths. Bronze to be malleable (cold) must not contain more 
than 5 per cent, tin ; but hot, it is malleable with 15 per cent. Bronze, 
to be malleable with a still higher per centage of tin, must be suddenly 
cooled, according to the process of d'Arcet. It then receives a mallea- 
bility which is not proper to it, and cannot be given to it by slow 
tempering. Now, as they have found in the lake dwellings some articles 
of bronze, containing ten per cent, of tin and more, and yet hammered 






append rx. 359 

into shape, it follows that the tempering of bronze must be almost as old 
as bronze itself. It is surprising, then, that the people of the Iron age 
were not in this way led to the discovery of steel, which, however, just 
the reverse of bronze, is hardened by plunging, and softened by slow 
cooling. 

M. Mariette informs me that the arms of the 11th Dynasty, mentioned 
in his Apercu, were not of metal. The swords are made of hard, dark, 
Nubian wood ; the arrow-heads and spear-points, of fish-bones. No copper 
or bronze armour of so early a date has been discovered. Gold ornaments 
however have been. Iron must have been known to the early Egyptians ; 
for their mythology contained a fable, that Osiris was slain by Typhon 
with an instrument of iron, and that the rust of iron was the blood of the 
murdered god. M. Mariette thinks that this superstition formed the 
obstacle to the employment of that metal by the old Egyptians ; but it 
seems to me that there must have been something hostile to the use of iron 
anteceding the superstition and suggesting the myth. Traces of primeval 
men are beginning to be found in and about Egypt. Caves in the Penin- 
sula of Sinai have yielded flint (or stone) arrow-heads, but have not yet 
been searched for bones. Other similar relics of the Stone age are spoken 
of between the first and second cataracts, in connection with recent species 
of fossils in the post-tertiary clay banks ; as, for example, at the Armenian 
convent opposite the island of Philae. 

Appendix to Lecture VIII. 

In Ireland, Minemon, 700 B.C., was the first Irish king who decorated 
the necks of his nobles with gold torques, and permitted them to wear 
armlets and bracelets also. But a century earlier (784 B.C.) Tigernach, 
the 26th king of Ireland, first worked its gold mines and caused one 
Theodore of "Weeklow to make golden clothes-pins for the neck instead 
of the bone and wooden skewers which his subjects wore. Pins, brooches, 
collars of gold are amongst the most ancient articles of gold and silver, 
and from their number we must judge that gold was most abundant in 
Britain in ancient times. Stream gold and nuggets always attract the 
savage eye, and are at once convertible to ornamental use. Some of the 
Irish plates and bars of gold seem to have been beaten out with a stone 
hammer, and are so rude that they must date back to the earliest an- 
tiquity. (O'Callaghan, Proc. Soc, York, 1863-4, p. 317.) 

There is an iron age, but no age of gold. All ages have been ages of 
gold. But in the beginning the savages had advantages in finding it, 
which their feeling for art was not advanced enough to allow of their 
turning to a proper use. The iron age is, after all, the age of gold. But 
each nation has a history which places the use of gold before the perfect 
use of iron. It is true that iron is destructible, and gold lasts for ever. 
But this fact is one which bears on the antecedent use of iron, for it makes 
gold lie in abundance upon the surface of the ground, while it covers iron 
up in rust and dirt beneath the soil. The earliest money therefore must 
have been of gold, and money took the earliest stamp of the fine arts. 
Then golden plates were spread on royal breasts, and grew to be whole 
panoplies. This was before the Trojan war. 



360 • APPENDIX. 

There stands an ancient barrow in the corner of a field at Mould in 
Flintshire, called the ' Hill of the Fairies/ and it is much dreaded by the 
peasantry, especially by night. ^ One chilly evening in the autumn of 1833 
an old woman of that neighbourhood was forced by circumstances to pass 
this awful mound, and what was her horror to behold a spectral figure 
slowly pacing to and fro upon its top, clothed in a golden coat, which 
shone upon her like the setting sun. She told the tale, of course, and 
great was the commotion all along that country-side. The owner of the 
land determined to remove the terrible barrow altogether. At first the 
excavations only turned up rude urns of unbaked pottery, containing 
burnt bones. But at the bottom, what was the astonishment and delight- 
ful horror of the ghost-believers to come upon a human skeleton wrapped 
round the chest with a corslet of the purest gold, embossed with an orna- 
mentation of superior design and workmanship ! The precious relic was 
at once broken up and sold, but the pieces were afterwards recovered 
from the purchasers, and the corslet may now again be seen, nearly com- 
plete, in the British Museum. (O'Callaghan, p. 318.) 

The gold ring-money of the Druids is probably the most ancient use to 
which that metal was placed. But the term money here seems to be 
inappropriate. These rings are supposed, for many good reasons, to have 
been sacred utensils, used for swearing troth and fealty on, and used in 
courts of justice as the Bible is now. 

Yet the ring was probably used in commerce by the Phoenicians, and 
is said to be the shape of money now in Africa. Mr Evans has shown 
that the concave coins, called ' dish money/ and other types, were in use 
in Britain and the Channel Islands long before the Roman occupation. 

The weapons and tools of the Assyrians and Egyptians were of gold 
or copper, if we may judge by the yellow colour used in painting them. 
Bronze weapons found in sepulchres show how that alloy was in use 
among them. Berzelius believed that Cornwall must have been the sole 
depot of tin known to the ancient civilized nations in the west. Coins of 
the Ptolemies and other Egyptian relics have been dug up in Cornwall ; 
for instance, two bronze bulls, in a deep cut, in the town of Penryn, in 
1850, intended for Apis, and in 1853 a bifrontal bust of Isis, in a ditch in 
Exeter. One or two places still bear Phoenician names. In Ireland the 
Phoenicians have left a multitude of gold and bronze relics. 

But the most interesting relics of the early use of gold are those which 
have been recently discovered in the tombs of the cemetery of Halstadt 
near Salzburg in the Austrian Tyrol, the site 'of perhaps the most import- 
ant salt-mines in Europe, taking into consideration the remote age at 
which they began to be wrought, and the intimate relations which were 
maintained with them by the people of the Italian peninsula. When 
these graves were made, it was an age of stone for the north and west of 
Europe. Iron had not yet come into use. The inhabitants of the tombs 
were probably neither the inside miners nor the outside villagers, but 
wealthy owners of a better class, perhaps foreigners from Italy, govern- 
ment officials, or visitors, their wives and their daughters. Many of the 
articles found are female ornaments ; and among these are noticeable a 
number of those curiously embossed and ornamented circular plates, some- 
times mistaken for small bucklers, but now known to archaeologists by 
the name of ' disques de chasteteV Weapons of men however were also 



APPENDIX. 361 

found, some of them of great price and beauty. One long sword had a 
handle of ivory. A dagger and sheath of solid gold is particularly remark- 
able. My friend Mr Desor tells me that he has found facsimiles of some 
of the more curious specimens on which are visible what seems to be an 
astronomical emblem, as well as rows of horses and dancing figures in 
pairs, and idols with spread-out legs and arms, in the Etruscan museums. 
Eor further information respecting the age of gold, see De Rougeinont 
Sur VAge de Bronze. Paris and Geneva, 1867. 

Appendix to page 187. 

The numerous prints of the human hand in red paint upon the ancient 
edifices of Central America have given rise to much discussion as to its 
possible meaning. I am informed by my friend Dr Goldberg that many 
of the battle-flags of Asiatic tribes overthrown in battle by the Russian 
troops, and preserved in the capital of the Empire, show the same sign, 
the impression of a human hand in red colour. The first of these trophies 
excited great surprise ; the Russian soldiery, to enhance their own re- 
putation for valour, declared that these impressions were made by the 
standard-bearers, when they grasped their colours with their dying hands, 
and dyed them with their blood. But the great number of such trophies 
soon set aside this romantic tradition, and proved that the custom was 
widespread among the Asiatic nations. In the East it is usual to conse- 
crate a dwelling-house or other structure of a permanent character, by 
killing a sheep, and dipping the naked hand in its blood, and stamping 
the wall. It is reported of Mahmoud that on the capture of Constanti- 
nople, riding on horseback into the church of St Sophia, he stopped 
before the door, dipped his right hand in blood, and stamped its impres- 
sion upon the door-post as high as he could reach. One cannot help 
recalling to mind the Hebrew custom of sprinkling the door-post at the 
Passover with blood ; and the rubente dextera manu of Horace. The 
hand in a ring, placed at the summit of the standards of the Roman 
legions, may, therefore, have an Eastern origin. And we must not forget 
that the ring was an amulet to swear by and to take an oath upon in the 
European world. The escutcheon of a monastery near Mecklenburg 
bears a monk holding a ring in his hand. Can this " red right hand " 
have anything to do with the uplifted faulcion of the Pharaohs on the walls 
of their monuments, smiting prostrate kings or flying hosts ? The flesh 
of the Egyptian is always painted red in these representations. The sign 
of life involves the hand in its sacredness. The hand occurs as the sacred 
letter t in the hieroglyphic vocabulary. 

Appendix to page 236. 

Cuneiform A. The reader would be greatly astonished, I feel sure, to 
see this letter (with strokes and top bar, however, plain and not wedge- 
shaped) hanging by a little ring, from the left elbow of a figure kneeling 
in a dish, and holding up both hands in adoration to a star. It actually 
occurs thus on the various faces of the 4 foursquare columns of the lately 



362 APPENDIX. 

excavated temple near the Ramesseum at Abydos. I observed, however, 
that from the elbow of one of the kneeling figures, wearing a hood and 
hawk-bill mask, depended, not the cuneiform A, but the five-pointed star 
which the others worshipped. Underneath the dish in which this one knelt 
I read the syphon S and the Anx ; while under the others were a chicken 
and a plain equilateral upright Christian cross, and under these again a 
horizontal line. This cuneiform A was therefore a talisman like the star, 
the an^, &c. See Appendix to pages 309, 310, below. 



Appendix to page 278. 

AUM. Maurice speaks of plain sculptures of the Trinity at 
Elephantine. In the Baghavat Geeta (page 80) Yishnu says : — ' I am 
the Holy One worthy to be known. I am the mystic figure OM. I am 
the Rig, Yagush, and Sarnan Yedas.' Dr Wilkins shows these letters to 
mean the creator, preserver, and destroyer. (Maurice's Ind. Antiq. iv. 
pp. 744, 745.) Moore in his Pantheon, p. 413, says that aum, aom, or 
awm, mean creator, preserver, destroyer, in that order. Sonnerat 
describes the Hindu Trinity in his Yoyages, i. p. 749. Eorster says that 
this Trinity is composed of Sri-mun-narrain, — the beautiful female 
Maha-letchimy ; — and a serpent (Sketches of Hindu Mythology, p. 12), 
in which we see mountain (or Noah), the ark, and the water. Maurice 
calls Narayen the supreme God. He says that Latchmi is the Imma of 
the Hebrew fabulists. (Ind. Antiq. iv. p. 750.) Coleman in his 
discussion of the Yedas (Asiat. Researches, v.) says that OM signifies 
God of Gods, and that all Brahmans are obliged to pronounce it internally 
(not audibly, at the beginning or ending of every lecture of the Yedas), as 
the Jews have taught us to use the word Amen. The Guyatri (called by 
Jones the Mother of the Vedas), the holiest text of Sanscrit sacred 
literature, is expressed by the sacred triliteral AUM. (See Coleman's 
Hindu Mythology, chapter x., and his second plate for a picture of the 
idol TRImurti, or Trinity.) Higgins, in his Celtic Druids, chapter ii., 
section 224, says that the OM or OM/* of the Irish Druids meant ' he 
who is. 5 

OMFE, o^r), is the name given in Greek fable to the black dove who 
founded the Delphic oracle. By a black dove was meant, of course, some 
member of an order of priests or priestesses dressed in black, commis- 
sioned from some older shrine of divination to a new one at this spot in 
Greece. But we must not forget that the Holy Ghost of the Christians 
took this form of a dove ; while that of the older Hebrews was always 
called a voice (col), or a breathing or rushing wind (ruh). (See Gen. ii. 
7 ; Ps. xxxiii. 6, &c.) The Alexandrine father of the Christian Church, 
Origen, taught (of course, by virtue of the Egyptian influences by which 
he was surrounded) that the Holy Ghost was female. His expression 
is: — 7raidt<TKr] de' Kvpiag tov aywv Ttvi.v\iaroQ rj $vxn> 'the soul is handmaid 
to her mistress the Holy Ghost.' Higgins (in his Apocalypse, vol. I., 
book iii., chap. 2, devoted to this word OM) gives the etymology of 
H(pr) as divine voice; responsum a deo datum consulenti. The om represents 
divinity, and the fe or pe represents voice or face (Greek verb <pr)ni, to 



APPENDIX. 363 

speak ; 0aw, I see; Hebrew HD and ^, face, mouth). Suidas calls on<p, 
Beta icXrjdujv, sacred voice, holy sound. Jacob Bryant is very learned in his 
treatment of the o/x in Greek names, and names of places, where he shows 
that the Greeks themselves were ignorant of the meaning of ofjKpi. O^iq 
is the second name which Plutarch gives to Osiris ; and Champollion sees 
in it the oun-nefer, " the beneficent," of the monuments. 

OMFALOS. The Phallic worship greatly confused the simple old 
Arkism. At first sight of*<pa-\oQ means any place of an oracle. Euripides, 
in Medea, calls Delphi, ofupaXoi ttjq yrjg, the navels of the earth (as 
Basnage in his Hist. Jud. III. xiv. p. 194, says the Jews called Jerusalem 
the world's navel), not only because they conceived of it as central and 
principal, but because from certain symbolic conceptions connected with the 
womb. Om-phalos may be nothing else than the divine phallus ; for we 
are informed that, in fact, a gigantic phallus, erected in front of the 
Delphic temple, was anointed every day with holy oil. But other etymo- 
logies might be found. Por example, <pa\og means benignant, and the 
oracle might be called ' divine grace. 5 But there is something behind all 
these words. In one of the pictures in Moore's Pantheon, Brahma is 
seen rising out of the navel of his mother Maia, with the umbilical cord 
uncut wound round him. The navel represented the ark, and the cord 
the water. There was a crescent-shaped boat carried about in the 
Delphic processions, and it had two names : Omphalos, the navel ; and 
Argo, the ark. That seems to tell the story plainly enough. The true 
etymology of omphalos, or as in Latin, um-bilicus, is om-baris, the divine 
ship of Osiris, the Holy Ark. The human belly received its name from 
its bulging, mountainous form. Hence the Phtah Sokari or dwarf god of 
Egypt, with the scarab on his head and two crocodiles under his feet, is 
represented with an immense belly. — The woman's belly represented the 
.tumulus with the priest within concealed. 

Whether Ammon, Am-un, received his name from this mystic syllable, 
or from the syllable man, mannus, menu, menes, &c, it is certain the 
great god Bacchus had epithets which contained it : for example, om-estes 
(translated by the Greeks the devourer~), and om-a-dius, the om god ; by 
which last he was known in Ohio and Tenedos. (Appendix to p. 316.) 

Om is the prefix to all the names of the seven heavens in India. It is 
the symbol of the lord of all, says an Purana, therefore it shall never pass 
away, although all the rites, sacrifices, and purifications of the Vedas 
shall pass away. (What a curious inversion this of Jesus' saying 
respecting his words !) When Brahma, as Chrisna, says to Arjun : — ' I 
am the creator of all ; all proceed from me ; I am beginning, middle, and 
end ; I am time ; I am all-grasping death ; I am the resurrection ; I am 
the mystic syllable OM ; I am generation and dissolution ; I am the fire 
and the victim also : ' and Arjun replies : — c Oh, all in all, infinite in 
power and glory, father of all, there is none like thee ! ' it is impossible 
to mistake the general sense of OM in composition, nor to remark the 
immediate juxtaposition of OM and the ideas of generation and destruc- 
tion. Its use in the Phallic mythology was inevitable. Hence the 
Roman nurses used the letter M, but pronounced by them (as Pliny tells 
us in Book 28, c. iv.) mu, as a charm against witchcraft and the evil eye, 
especially against fascination by the god Fascinus, whose image was a 
penis or phallus, and was worn about the necks of the women and 






364 APPENDIX. 

children, like the Agnus Dei of the Christians. The truth was, an 
image of the mountain or the ship was a charm against danger from 
water, so a water symbol, like this M, was a protection against the 
phallic mountain', the male organ of generation. 

AM, Db$, was the old Hebrew word for mother. It is used in 
connection with Eve, in Genesis ii. 24. But it would occur in Arkite 
mythology as the name for the ark when considered as a virgin mother. 
The al-ma of the Phoenicians, al-me of the Hebrews, meaning Virgin, 
became the Alma, mater of the Latins, a word unknown to the Greeks, but 
meaning the mother. — Respecting the name JJm-gummel, on the highland 
east of Heliopolis, Wilkinson says that the prefix. TJM is remarkable for 
its antiquity, and stands before the names of several mountain-ranges in 
the Goshen desert. " It is an ancient African word," he adds, " implying 
greatness or excellence, as in Ama-zulu among the CafFres, and in Berber 
names in North Africa; but it is not related to the Arabic um. or om, 
mother." 

OM is solar fire, says Sir "William Jones. Time (TTfiTl) was the 
female solar orb in Syria. ATJN and AH (]*)W, "}M) is the way the 
name of the Egyptian city of the sun is spelt in Hebrew Scriptures. (A 
word translated ' strength ' in other passages.) In these instances we 
see how the sun- worshipping mythology, like the phallic mythology, 
adapted the Arkite words to its own use. What connection this Syrian 
sun-god had with H«M (SH), the son of Noah, to whom Egypt was 
given (according to the LXX), we do not know. 

OM-EAE. represents the most common compound of OM ; but it 
infers an element of obscurity ; since by an organic law of language, 
illustrated by Haldeman and others, M followed by certain other letters 
either takes a B after it, or converts the following letter into B. Thus, a 
proper name like Omri must come in course of time to be pronounced 
Ombri. Notwithstanding this source of error, we are safe in dividing 
most words of this form into om and bar, in which case we have the two 
most sacred of all ancient Arkite words. Sometimes the bar will have 
reference to the mountain, and sometimes to the ship. 

Ombria, for example, is the name which Pliny gives to an aerolite, 
calling it a precious, or sacred stone, which has descended from heaven 
(N. Hist., 37, x.) Nothing could equal such a fetich in the eyes of an 
Arkite; unless it might be the next example. It is possible that the 
Hebrew word for stone, AVN (]^S) has some connection with it also, 
for it is constructed like the aum of the Hindoos, and gave name to the 
place where Jeroboam set up the worship of the calves for Israel. 

Amber, the precious gem found floating on the sea, and found cut intc 
the shape of an animal in one of the lake-dwelling deposits of Switzer- 
land, is another instance. Pliny says that in ancient Egypt it was called 
sacal (the Latin sacer, holy). Its Hebrew name in Exodus xxx. 34, 
where it forms an ingredient of frankincense, is the same, Sheceleth 
(although the LXX translates this word, marine onyx, blatta byzantina, 
an odorous Eastern shell). The Scythians also called it sacrium. Some 
have thought that Sicily, or Siculia, got its name from furnishing this 
gem. But it is easy to see that the Arkism was as good for the three- 
cornered Etna-bearing island as for the amber. The Greek name for it, 
Electron, seems to be quite another thing, and etymologists have talked 



APPENDIX. 365 

of elek-tor, radiant star, and elek, the Arabic name for tree-gum, and 
schachal. the Aramean verb to sweat and weep. But as the Greek logos 
is the Hebrew col, a voice, and would be scol if the terminal s were also 
included in the inversion, so the Shemitic sacal could become the Greek 
elek, losing the s ; or rather the Greek elektr, converting the s into t or r. 
Homer's elecktron, an alloy of gold and silver, merely resembled amber in 
colour. The Phoenician rosaries were of alternate gold and amber beads. 
The mysterious origin of amber gave it great price in Arkism ; the poets 
sang how the sister Heliades mourned their brother Phaethon, were 
changed to poplars, and dropped their amber tears into the Eridanus or 
Po, which Nilsson makes the German river Eider, between which and the 
Elbe the amber coast Raunonia (read Rauronia, as Geneva Genabrum was 
called in the middle ages Gehenna), from Rav, Rafr, Rbv, the Scandina- 
vian and Prison names of amber. As the palace of Menelaus was 
adorned with gold and amber, so in a palace near St Petersburg there is 
an entire room walled or wainscotted with pieces. 

Umbri. This will stand for an example of the extensive use made of 
Arkite radical words for designating societies and populations as religious 
communities. The Umbrians were a powerful people before the rise of 
the Etruscan power. Niebuhr says that the Greeks recognized in the 
name ombria an allusion to a very high antiquity. Pliny says that its 
inhabitants were supposed to be the oldest in Italy, and were called by the 
Greeks ombri, because they were the only survivors of a general deluge. 
(Nat. Hist. B. 3, chap, xiv.) There were Heraclidan traditions of one 
Italos or Itoulos, the father of Italy, whose name signified a bull. If 
this was not a conceit engendered by the Latin word for calf, vitulus, then 
we must see in it a direct Arkite reference to the Arabic tel (mountain), 
and Greek tauros (bull). Italos was I-tobul-us, like Aris-tobul-us, &c. 
In the bull we have the mountain radical in Vm-bri-R. The word occurs 
in Humber, Cumberland, &c. 

TJM means around, circular, and connects the radical with the Druid 
mythology, or the sacredness of the circle. The Latin circ-um, around, 
contains the .word church and the sacred syllable om. This also is a 
branch of astronomical or solar mythology ; the ancient circular dances 
and processions are still in full force in the Catholic Church. The Latin 
word for going around or being ambient is am-bire. There are other 
words (like am-biges) which retain the same meaning. The German urn 
zu placed ' before verbs is another instance. Jamieson, in his Hermes 
Scythicus, page 6, shows the circular force of this radical in the northern 
countries of Europe, 

Appendix to pages 300 and 321. 

A'NUP. Anubis. The jackal-headed staff occurs in the prenomen 
cartouches (fig. 21) of B.aNXJSXt, the fifth king of the 5th dynasty, and of 
HaTJSK, the first king of the 6th dynasty, in the newly discovered tablet 
of Abydos ; and is read in both of them as the letter U. It occurs again 
in the prenomen cartouche of RaUSS, a king of the 11th dynasty. It is 
the first letter in the names of Osortasen I., II., III., of the 12th dynasty. 
But when we come down to the times of the 19th dynasty, and find it in 



366 



APPENDIX. 



the prenomen cartouche of the great Rameses, it seems to have its original 
symbolic meaning of guardian, — ' the sun, guardian of truth.' In the pre- 
nomen of Seti II. we must evidently read, not literally RaUToTJMAMN, 
but symbolically. ' Sun, guardian of worlds, beloved of Amnion. 5 

The first letter of the name of the Pharaoh of the 19th dynasty, who 
came between Ramses I. and Ramses II. (Sesostris), who began to build 
the Ramessium of Abydos, and whose oval (the 8th in fig. 21) closes the 
great tablet of Abydos and is repeated in a multitude of places on the 
walls of the corridors,— is called by Sharpe OIMeNePhTaH, or ' Osirei 
approved of Phtah.' But as he was a great king-builder his ovals are in 
great confusion, and sometimes read (as in the 7th of fig. 21, from Wilk- 
inson) PhTaH-MeN-S-PhTaH, ' approved of Phtah, son of Phtah/ 
Here Phtah has usurped the place of Osiris. But in some of his ovals the 
image of the dog-headed deity Anubis occupies that position, and in many 
of them Anubis has been chiselled out and Osiris substituted ; perhaps 
from some change of politics or religion. There is some trouble also about 
his name Oserei having been once Sethi, and a tradition that his body was 
refused burial. Whether all this has anything to do with identifying the 
old god Anubis and the old devil Seth, — or with the substitution in Ge- 
nesis of Seth for Cain and Abel, I do not know. But Sharpe affirms that 
the squatting jackal with his tail erected (see his figure p. 71, vol. I. Hist, 
Egypt), looking very much like the Hebrew N, aleph, was the letter A or 
O which was chiselled out to make place for Osiris, everywhere from 
Ethiopia to San, upon the sea-coast. Wilkinson suggests that this king 
was not admitted into the Theban lists because he was a Memphite (which 
may have had something to do with his change of religion), or because he 
was only ' king consort ' of the Queen Taosiri. But that there was no 
conflict in the mythologies of Osiris and Anubis is seen from the fact that 
the jackal staff vowel, TJ or 0, occurs in this queen's oval, as the first let- 
ter of the word Osiris ; as it does in the name of Osirtasen. 

On the monuments the jackal is frequently seen couchant on the top of 
a miniature temple or facade of a tomb. 



OIMNOTH 




The name Sab, or Seb, occurs mythologically in a very curious sepul- 
chral document of the 11th dynasty, discovered by M. Mariette at Abydos, 
and published in the Appendix to his Catalogue of the Musasum at Boulaq. 
On this cenotaph of an official named Roma, the god Osiris is addressed 
thus : ' Hail to thee, Osiris ! first son of the God SEB, eldest of the five 
divine children of the goddess Nout, eldest grandson of Ra, father of fa- 
thers, placed near Ra, king of ages, lord of eternity . . . Ureeuses around 
his head . . . No one knows his name. Innumerable are his names in the 






APPENDIX. 367 

cities and provinces. The sun rises by his will ... He makes prosperity . 
Osiris of Abgdos, lord of Tattou, king of Amenti . . . Saluted by Beset in 
his double form ... I come to thee, Osiris ! master of Toser . . . Accord 
me to be luminous in heaven, powerful on earth, and justified like the lords 
of the graveyard . . . ' &c. 

It is very remarkable that the dog Cerberus, sitting on its haunches on 
an altar before Osiris, in the celebrated soul-weighing judgment scene in 
the Theban tombs, is a bitch, and its figure instantly recalls to the spec- 
tator the she-wolf of Rome, 



Appendix A to page 301. 

The Sphinx. The platform of Magnesian Limestone rocks, upon which 
the pyramids of Gizeh stand, is an irregular promontory of the great table 
land, the eastern edge of which forms the western barrier of the valley of 
the Nile. At this promontory the edge of the table land begins to make 
its trend towards the north-west and west, or, in other words, begins to 
make the south-west barrier of the Delta. Before the deposit of the Delta 
this promontory and the opposite promontory, on the end of which stands 
the citadel of Cairo, together, formed the gate at the mouth of the Nile. 
It is hardly proper to say, as in the text, that the sphinx stands c all 
alone' as 'an isolated outcrop of rock rising from the inundated valley 
of the Nile.' It is a mere protuberance, at the very edge of the platform ; 
and it is so small, while the platform stretches away as far as the eye can 
reach, and it is so overhung by the enormous masses of the larger pyra- 
mids, and is so near and subordinate to the three small ruined pyramids, 
which screen the base of the Cheops, that it remains an insignificant ob- 
ject in the landscape, until it is closely approached. This could not have 
been quite so much the case before the accumulating of sand had been 
permitted to bury it nearly up to the level of its back ; but nevertheless 
its mass of rock was never more than one of the many accidents in the 
rock outcrop wall which here rises from the plain. The most remarkable 
feature about it is the visible dip of the strata eastward, causing^an ap- 
pearance of insecurity in the position of the sphinx, as if it might at any 
moment begin to slip and slide forward, and not stop until it was buried 
in the mud of the plain. This dip is brought into bold relief by the deep 
and regular weathering of the rock mass out of which it was cut. Any 
good photograph of it will show how the weathering has gone on ; but the 
traveller will be interested in observing that the same eroding process has 
gone on in the case of all the rock-surfaces near by ; as may be seen upon 
the outcrop a few hundred yards to the north of it, in which are the open 
grottoes where visitors sometimes spend the night ; and in the outcrops 
along the road ascending to the north face of the Cheops ; and even on 
the surfaces of the great blocks in the base of the pyramid itself. The 
climate of Egypt has formerly been much more destructive to building- 
stone than it is now ; but even now it weathers into new-cut surfaces with 
ease and rapidity. The sand which half buries the sphinx is the blown 
debris of all these weathered rock-surfaces. In a few more thousand years 
the head and breast of the sphinx will be mouldered down by the action of 
the air into an indistinguishable roundish ' cheese-ring.' It has been a 



368 APPENDIX. 

good fortune for us of the 19th century that the sand has been carelessly 
allowed to accumulate about these monuments, and so preserve them for 
our curiosity. — The dip of which I have spoken, continuing to rise gradu- 
ally westward, obliged the Pharaohs to cut out areas to contain their great 
pyramids, and at the same time gave the Memphite nobles a chance to ex- 
cavate horizontal tombs in the wall of the area behind the pyramids, that 
is, facing their western sides, — In spite of all that has been said, however, 
it remains true that when the platform of rock, its front wall over a hun- 
dred feet high, its larger and smaller pyramids, and its tombs, were kept 
in good order by the government of ancient Memphis, as its Pere-la- Chaise, 
the sphinx must have presented a rare and splendid show to the proces- 
sions of priests and mourners as they ascended, by a slanting highway, the 
cliffs directly in front and underneath it. In fact, its position could not 
have been more happily chosen had it been entirely of artificial manu- 
facture. 

I have spoken on page 306 of the meaning of the sphinx figure as a 



female. The Egyptian sphinxes are often androgenous, being furnished 
with beards, and it is possible that the great sphinx was provided with 
this sign of virility, although no trace of it now remains. But the usual 
interpretation, of combined intelligence, strength, and speed, does not in 
any case hold good, for the sphinx possesses no wings. And even when 
wings are given to chimerical emblems they do not necessarily imply 
speed, because the wing was used like the hair, like wool, like scales, and 
like the twisted cord, to symbolize water. 

There is a strange, but very common, mythological Egyptian sphinx, 
related to the tombs, the goddess Thoueris of the Greek writers, in Egyp- 
tian t~KB-oer, ' the great (female) AP,' or simple t-oer, ' the great one ' 
(feminine article). She has a hippopotamus' body and griffon's or lion's 
claws, and sometimes a lion's head. Plutarch calls her the concubine of 
Typhon, as Isis was the wife of Osiris, his brother. Her name suggests 
a new etymology for TABOH, namely, f the great, or vast.' This god- 
dess carries the mystical knot ; see Catalogue of Boulaq Musaeum, p. 94 
& 95. But the most important connection of this goddess is through her 
proper name, AP, as a hippopotamus, with APis, the sacred bull, whose 
name, Mariette asserts (Catalogue, page 92), is frequently cited on monu- 
ments of the age of the pyramids, and whose worship (Manetho is quoted 
for the assertion) was inaugurated by Cechoiis, a king of the second dy- 
nasty ! If this be true the precedency of Anubis is Drought into serious 
question. 

Appendix B to page 301. 

The Egyptian Cornice. Since seeing the remains of the Egyptian piles 
myself, I am much less impressed by the overhanging massiveness of the 
cornice, when compared with the vast heights and breadths of the walls. 
It seems to me also very possible, that the idea of the cornice was either 
generated, or at least reinforced, by the magnificent lights and shadows 
of the natural cornices of the cliffs which border the valley, and over at 
intervals the water of the Nile. The strata being almost universally ho- 
rizontal (with only an insensible rise towards the south), and consisting 






APPENDIX. 369 

of alternate courses of soft marls and harder limestone, there ensue series 
of overhanging cliffs and long, straight, even ledges of rock, at various 
heights, from fifty to five hundred feet, above the river, calculated to im- 
press the imagination powerfully. 



Appendix to page 302. 

Origin of the Egyptian population. The slave trade is forbidden by law, 
and slavery is nominally abolished in Egypt. Yet in actual fact a very 
large number of blacks are held in slavery in the valley of the Nile ; and 
the British vice-consul, Mr Reed, disguised as a Mogrebbin Arab trader, 
visited thirty or forty slave marts, in Cairo, and other places in the Delta, 
and found three thousand slaves for sale in them, in the summer of 1867. 
In all ages of the world the negroes of the interior have inundated Egypt. 
All the sailors at the First Cataract, and all the guards and watchmen of 
the houses and stores of Alexandria, are intensely black Berberines, who 
are accounted the most courageous and the most reliable servants in 
Egypt. Many of the slaves of gentlemen at Benisuef, Assiout, and other 
large towns upon the Nile, are so peculiarly black, that even the ' white 
of the eye ' is black ; and the skin, not being glossy, presents none of 
those reflections which play upon the face of the negroes in the United 
States. The tablets of the Pharaohs recount repeated conquests of negro 
nations, ending with their deportation en masse and settlement in Egypt. 
The whole population of Egypt, with the exception of a few thousand 
Erank strangers, and a few thousand Turkish and Armenian families, whose 
colour is kept pretty white by marriage with Circassian slave women, is 
either quite black or of various deep mulatto shades. It may therefore 
be safely said, that, in the main, Egypt has been settled from the South, 
— from the negro lands of Central Africa ; and I believe that this black- 
skin origin will prove to correspond with a primeval mythology indigenous 
also to Africa. 

Two exceptions to this rule must however be noticed. Eirst, the Arab 
tribes of the desert on the west, and of the desert between the river valley 
and the Red Sea, although themselves black, and oftentimes as black as 
Darfour negroes, are evidently a separate race. But the monumental his- 
tory of Egypt shows that they were always nomades, always enemies, and 
never much adulterated the popular blood of the valley of the Nile. The 
traveller sees in many places the remains of the vast wall which the Pha- 
raohs built at the edge of the desert, from the Delta all the way up to the 
first cataract, to restrain the incursions of these untamable and hostile 
barbarians ; a wall five hundred miles long, and oftentimes approaching 
within half a mile of the eastern bank of the river. These were the shep- 
herds whom the Egyptians always and naturally held in the greatest 
abomination, and whom the existing government still holds in such respect, 
that it levies no taxes on them, and dares not refuse them the right of 
carrying arms, while all the fellahin of the valley are disarmed. The affi- 
liation of these Arabs with the tribes of the Arabian peninsula, and with 
the tribes of Syria, is of course well known, and may help to explain the 
history of the conquest of Egypt by the Hyksos. 

24 



370 APPENDIX. 

The second exception relates to a peculiar race which inhabits the sea- 
coast of the eastern division of the Delta, and allowed to be the descend- 
ants of a Shemitic population, identifiable perhaps with the Hyksos them- 
selves, whose capital was San, near the coast. In the ruins of San there 
have been discovered sufficient evidences of the fact that the expulsion of 
the Hyksos was a very imperfect operation ; that, in fact, a large part of 
the Hyksos people never left the Delta, at the time when the Hyksos 
government was destroyed and its leading men were exiled. All this 
amounts to saying, merely, that the country of the Delta between Cairo 
and the Suez Canal and the sea-shore has always belonged ethnologically 
to Asia and not to Africa, and has never lost or greatly changed its Asiatic 
population. The presence of Hebrews in this part of the Delta, or in the 
' table land ' (Goshen) back of it, in extremely ancient times, becomes a 
fact of comparatively slight importance ; while the great role which the 
Jews played in the history of the Delta, for five hundred years before the 
time of Christ, receives an easy explanation. 

The traveller from America however is greatly astonished to see, as he 
ascends the Nile, men of a perfect copper colour, standing in pairs and 
groups upon the bank, at intervals, quite naked, working shedoofs or dip- 
pers, to lift the water of the river over the bank into small canals, which 
run inland to irrigate the fields. These men are tall and strong, but rather 
slim, very graceful and dignified, but lively and cheerful, and when wet 
by the dripping buckets, their skin shines in the sunlight like the side of 
a polished copper kettle ; both colour and lustre quite metallic. But when 
the skin is dry a white film or plum bloom spreads over it, which may be 
due to sweat, but is noticeable on them when quite at rest. In this cop- 
per skin we have the exact representative of the m£-coloured flesh of the 
Egyptian on the monuments. There is no mistaking it. What the origin 
of this race is, or whether it be a separate race, I do not know ; nor how, 
if it be a separate blood, it has kept itself distinct from other Egyptian 
blood. But it is in relation to the red Egyptian that the question of the 
origin of the Pharaonic regime becomes of ethnological importance. 

Appendix to page 303. 

Ev apxy, in the ark, ' in the beginning.' The Hebrew hereshith, in the 
beginning, from rosh, the head, contains apparently the same root : rosh = 
orsh ■= apx- It is very curious to see how the Latins retained the use of 
two letters, which the Greeks converted into one. The Copts wrote CH 
like the Latins, out of which the Greeks made %. The Copts were fol- 
lowed by the Latins in writing separately TH, out ot which the Greeks 
made 6, by crossing the Coptic h with a line, instead of writing the t (a 
cross upon its side) in front of it. The Coptic CH is, when pronounced, 
not kh but sh. 

Appendix A to page 307. 

Music. This perpetual waving and wailing, ascending and falling ca- 
dence in music, is especially noticeable in the native music of Egypt in the 
present day. 



APPENDIX. 371 

Appendix B to page 307. 

Lotus. I have said little or nothing in the text about the symbolism 
of the papyrus tuft and bud, which shared, with the lily flower and bud, 
the veneration of the Egyptians, because they are in the Arkite sense 
mere substitutes for one another, and are mistaken for one another by all 
travellers. The papyrus may reasonably be considered a later symbol, 
adopted for the purpose (among others) of distinguishing Lower Egypt, 
of which it was the peculiar emblem, from Upper Egypt, whose emblem 
was the lotus. Of course its use in literature gave to the papyrus tuft 
and plant a peculiar sacredness. One of the most beautiful objects in 
Egypt is the pair of square monoliths with square heads in front of the 
shrine at Karnak, on the tall smooth sides of one of which you see, in high 
relief, merely three stalks of papyrus, and on the other three stalks of 
lotus. 

Appendix A to page 308. 

Fir-cone. When split through the apex and centre the fir-cone shows a 
section which reveals the seeds in their cells. This section was adopted 
by the priestly architects as the theme of the most beautiful of all running 
ornaments, the Greek honeysuckle moulding. Single sections were erected 
upon the summit and at the outer angles of the pediment of the Corinthian 
temple ; situations where the Latins used the urn. 



Appendix B to page 308. 

AncJi and tarn. These two symbols, the sign of life, or crux ansata, and 
the hoopoo-headed fork-footed staff or tarn sceptre, occur incessantly and 
universally upon the walls of the monuments of the middle and lower 
empires. They form running mouldings, along the surbases of the walls, 
following around the angles, and binding the parts of the building together 
with lace-like fringes. They form bands at intervals from the base to the 
capital of the columns in the porticos of the temples at Denderah and at 
Edfou. They cover, in regular horizontal stripes, the whole inside wall 
of the triumphal gateway which stands by itself in front of the ruins of 
Karnak, the superbest gateway in the world, in the presence of which the 
far larger Arc de l'Etoile at Paris would seem cold and tasteless, and the 
little arches of Titus and Severus the erections of prosaic boys. 

In the hieroglyphic records tbe natural alliance and the usual appear- 
ance of the av% is with the isosceles pyramid, the two together meaning 
' giver, or gift, of immortality.' But in ornamental architecture, and in 
the symbolism of royalty, the av% and tarn go together. The tarn is held 
upright by standing and sitting gods and kings, and expresses simply and 
always governing jjower, or the right to rule. Added to the av% it means 
immortal sovereignty. The combination is accomplished in many ways. 
On the running mouldings the anch stands between two tarns, the hoopoo- 
heads of which are on a line with and looking at the handle of the cross ; 
and all three stand on the flat base of a segment of a circle. This group 



372 



APPENDIX. 



is then repeated as often as is needful to go round the column or along 
the wall. But the sign of life is frequently seen issuing from the hoopoo- 
head of the tam sceptre, and often in connection with the nilometer or tat. 
Sometimes the hand which grasps both the tam sceptre, the flail, and the 
crook, holds also the handle of the sign of life : this is the case on all the 
walls of the palace of Rameses II. at Abydos. 

In the text I speak of the ring of the avx, or crux ansata ; but after 
copying it a hundred times and in many styles of art, I was unable to find 
a single instance where the handle of the cross could properly be called a 
ring ; it was always a loop. An apparent exception to this rule only makes 
the rule more manifest. The protecting vulture over the head of certain 
Pharaohs always holds in both claws, or more properly stands with both 
talons on the upper curve of a ring, to the bottom of which is attached a 
crosspiece, or water-line ; but in no case does this become a cross. This 
distinction is consistently maintained between the round ring with the 
crosspiece in the bird's talons (called a seal, xtm), and the pear-shaped 
loop to the cross in the priest's or god's hand. The loss of the upright of 
the cross in the first case is not strange ; since that represents the moun- 
tain, which the bird (or ship), when floating on the water-line, has left far 



Fig. 22. 




Figures on the west wall of second grand gallery of columns in the 
Eamesseum at Abydos. 



APPENDIX. 373 

beneath it. But the invariability of the pear-shape of the loop of the crux 
ansata I cannot explain. For granting that it was made actually of leather 
and strapped down to the crosspiece (as an examination of the larger re- 
presentations of it will show was the fact), it is wonderful that it was 
never made of bronze or copper or gold, or other rigid substance, which 
would keep the circular form. 

I have alluded in a note on page 310 to the figures of gods or priests 
approaching the face of a Pharaoh, as an artist would measure the features 
of a statue with a pair of dividers formed of a combination of two tarns 
enclosing an anch. This action is repeated on many of the monuments of 
Egypt, and represents, in some cases at least, as in the celebrated annun- 
ciation scene at Karnak, the introduction of life into the person. In that 
scene two goddesses are introducing into the mouth of the queen mother 
their anchs, to give life to her conception of the young Pharaoh. On one 
of the walls of the Ramesseum at Abydos I noticed a beautiful combina- 
tion of the nilometer (tet), the sistrum, the sign of life {anch), and two 
sceptres (tam), presented to the lips of the Pharaoh ; Pig. 22 a. And over 
his head the vulture holding the ring and crosspiece (chtm), to which was 
attached an anch and two tarns : Pig. 22 b. In the first case the loop of 
the anch, receiving the head of the tet, with its four normal cross lines, is 
also crossed by three supplementary bars, which convert it into a sistrum. 



Appendix to pages 309 and 310. 

Pyramid amulets of the Bronze age. In Macmillan's Magazine for Sep., 
1867, there is an interesting article, describing the discoveries of flint in- 
struments in the upper and lower gravel beds of the Ponte Molle quarries, 
outside the walls of Ptome, by Sign. Ceselli, beginning in 1846. The au- 
thor goes on to say, that among the numerous arrowheads and what not 
in the splendid cabinet of M. Ceselli, are two or three of a very peculiar 
shape, and very small. They are between an isosceles and equilateral 
triangle in shape, and about three-quarters of an inch long. At the back 
the natural fracture of the flint remains, and this is a characteristic of the 
earliest worked flints. But the front has three bevels carefully and skill- 
fully done, following the three sides of the triangle. The top is purposely 
not brought to a point, and has a peculiar indentation on one side, by 
means of which the article could be suspended from a thread around the 
neck. It was an amulet. A few days after his discovery of these he 
detected another in a basket full of fresh specimens, just brought in from 
the ploughed fields of Montecelli, 20 miles from Rome, to the Abate Carlo 
Rusconi, for his cabinet. Again, he found this form of amulet among the 
'Etruscan' gems in the shop of the great jeweller of Rome, Castellani, 
who considered them far older than the Etruscan era, and called them 
Pelasgic, for want of a better name. These were found at Prteneste, and 
were made of rich red amber, wrought and polished with superior skill, 
bevelled three ways in front, and left plain behind, and furnished at the 
top with a regularly perforated bead or buglehead, by which they could all 
be strung together. There were about two dozen. 

The ancients have left abundant proofs that the flints of the Stone age 






374 APPENDIX. 

were regarded as heavenly productions, thunder-stones, Ceraunia^ and 
Betuli, and were worn as amulets. Eossil teeth also were so worn, and 
called tongue-stones, glossopetree. In Castellani's collection were some of 
pre-Etruscan age,, in their natural condition, but mounted in holders of 
exquisite workmanship, in gold, and others imitated in agate, bloodstone, 
&c. Pliny recounts that they fell from the sky in the wane of the moon. 
But the ancients knew also of their occurrence in the bone earth of caves ; 
for in Sign. Rossi's pamphlet, quoted by the author of the article in Mac- 
millan's Magazine, Claudian is quoted saying : 

Pyrseneis que sub antris 

Ignia flumineae legere ceraunia nymphse. 
Water-nymphs have collected fiery thunderbolts in the caves of the Pyrenees. 

It is not strange, then, that the arrowhead thus worshipped, and thus 
worn as an amulet, should have been adopted as the sacred type of the 
Assyrian alphabetic character. 

The use of amulets dates from the origin of the human race. The cases 
of the Boulaq Museum are full of them. They were not only in the form 
of scarabei and little gods. I noticed. scores of little nilometers ; scores 
of little neck-pillows ! and on the wall of the Serapeum at Saqqarah I saw 
and copied a human figure, holding a neck-pillow in his left hand, as if it 
were the sign of life — which I feel sure it was ; for the lune-shaped upper 
piece to receive the head, the upright stem, and the flat horizontal base- 
board, together exactly make up the triple symbol. (See top of page 300, 
and bottom of page 263.) 

But the most extraordinary of all the kinds of amulets in the Boulaq 
Museum were those in the shape of a Roman letter A, I should say an 
English block-letter A, cut out clean and smooth from a plate of bronze 
or other metal, and sometimes drilled at the apex to receive a thread. 
This fact fully bears out all I have said on pages 236 to 239 of Lecture 
IX. on the alphabet. Eor in this Boulaq collection this sort of amulet is 
illustrated by a numerous suite of specimens, showing a gradual transition 
from the plain triangle through the triangle notched at the base, or en- 
graved so as to bring out the mason's square, up to the plain square (some- 
times with a bugle soldered to its edge) and the square with its cross- 
piece, and finally to the isosceles with a cross-piece, in the exact form of 
an A. 

M. Mariette (in his catalogue, page 133, Yitrine M) says that the angle, 
or square, was a symbol of mystery and adoration, the triangle of 
equilibrium, and were hung about the necks of the mummies to mark that 
eternal rest which awaits the just. No doubt. But the question is how 
did they acquire that meaning ? and why do they assume the shape of the 
letter A ? 

The Book of the Dead directs also that little columns of feldspar, and 
seals of lapis lazuli, discs of red paste ' placed on the character mountain? 
as well as nilometers and signs of life, should be suspended at the neck 
of the defunct. Fibula and amethyst cornelian, hematite, and green feld- 
spar hearts are also found with mummies. Sometimes a scarabeus is en- 
graved on the heart ; and sometimes the bird bemiou (the phoenix). See 
Appendix to page 236, above. 

See also the curious offering of onions, tied into the form of the lacus- 



APPENDIX. 375 

trine amulet (figured in the text, page 310), which. Wilkinson 'figures on 
page 324 of the first volume of his Ancient Egyptians. 



Appendix to page 316. 

B, beth, a house. I have referred in the text to the inversion of beth = 
theb, bringing this letter into its proper Arkite relationship. Its Hebrew 
squa re form 3 seems to me directly derivable from the hieroglyphic letter 
fj, read h by Egyptologists. Its sound was a gentle aspirate equivalent 
to the Greek r\, because its Coptic name was (in Greek letters) HI, but 
the meaning of this name i)i in Coptic is house ; and while the Hebrews 
gave this meaning as a name to their letter beth, they used the form for 
their phonetic b, because b is the initial letter of beth, their name for a 
house. But there are other connections. Isis was characterized by her 
ship or ark. Yet the monumental name of Isis is composed of three sym- 
bols, read MNH, or in full, Coptic, Men-n-ei, that is, mistress of the house. 
This meant, no doubt, goddess of the temple. But it must have meant 
more than that ; for every deity was equally master or mistress of its own 
temple. It points to an original identity between house and ship, beth 
and theb. 

It is something more than a curious coincidence that this name of Isis 
is* almost exactly that of the half-historical, half-mythical Menu, Mena, 
Menes, first king of the first dynasty, and founder of the oldest empire. 
The tablet of Abydos commences with his name (fig. 23), an oval contain- 
ing three letters, the top one and middle one being identical with the first 
and second in the name of Isis. The third is & feather, A ; not the hawk 
A, nor the arm A, but the ostrich feather, symbol of government and 
victory : while the third letter in the name of Isis is the house H. Now 
everybody reads these three letters M<?NA, or M^UE, or MeNTJ. The 
Greeks read it fitvrj, which makes it perfectly identical with the name of 
Isis. But why should we not read it also symbolically as we do the name 
of Isis, Men-n-a, Master of the plume ? When we remember, however, 
that the letter A was used to signify building (see text, page 228) and a 
house, the identity of the names of Menes and Isis is demonstrated. What 
this astonishing coincidence means I leave my readers, with the key in 
their possession, to guess. But it illustrates exactly the idea I have ex- 
pressed in the text. If the ancient symbolizers of Isis could find three 
signs that signified her character, they did not care what the juxtaposition 
of those three signs or letters would produce in the shape of a word ; 
whatever that word should be they would adopt it as one of her names. 

Take another instance. The name of the god Phtah has never been 
satisfactorily explained by mere comparative philology. The Pharaohs 
used it as part of their names, beloved of Phtah, 'PhTaH-'M.ai. The 
dwarfish, big-bellied images of the god in the Museum of Boulaq all have 
a scarabeus on the ,head, and two crocodiles under foot. The scarab 
meant the world, as all acknowledge ; the crocodiles meant the waters ; 
the big belly, bandy legs, dwarfish figure of the god were characteristic 
symbols of the mountain witli its mines and horrors. To express these 
three ideas in hieroglyphs was easy enough. A circle for the world-ship, 
a semicircle for the mountain, and a waved line for the water — and the 



376 APPENDIX. 

triple symbol was spelled. But the circle was already devoted to the solar 
orb, so they took the square, meaning house, enclosure of any kind. For 
the waved line they took the twisted cord, which symbolized water. But 
the square was the letter P aspirated, the semicircle T, and the three- 
looped twist of cord H. When these were put together in the Arkite order, 
ship, mountain, water, they gave the priests a new name for their divinity 
— PkTaH.. Afterwards, when an M had to be added, meaning beloved, 

Figure 23. 

HUH EMM Kmy| H M ft 

Menes. Isis. Amun. Phtah. Phtah-mai. 

it became more convenient to stand the twisted cord upright alongside of 
the Ph. and T, as in fig. 23. This dwarf, by the way, is the Phtah pa- 
teques of Herodotus [father of waters ?], whose image stood on the prow 
of Phoenician ships, a sort of Castor, or Pollux ; in whose names, without 
discussing them further, w T e read at least i^he tor and the bar ; and whose 
issue from Leda's swan-egg would make Castor's name unmistakably Ark- 
ite, even if it were not the name the ancients gave to the beaver, on ac- 
count of its wonderful habit of building half-submerged Ararats for itself 
to live in. 

If the A in Menes' name, fig. 23, be not a feather, but, as some main- 
tain, the Coptic Ake, a reed, or its plume, then w r e have another illustra- 
tion of this word- building ; for the M symbol will float on the water-line 
N, and under it will be the obeliskal submerged reed or Alpine letter A. 

And if the M symbol represents an ark with its crew, then the group 
AMN (the usual form of the name of the Theban Jupiter) will be another 
instance of the same kind ; the Alpine symbol A being placed for com- 
pactness on one side of the ship and water symbols. ' 

Brugsh, in his book on the Calendar, p. 17, shows that 'Amun' was 
written sometimes with the figure of a lizard (with only two fore feet, and 
as if crawling sideways on a wall), — and also sometimes with a cartouche 
(on its side) containing a single water-line ; in other words, an N in an 
Arn. Is this a hint to be used in our oft-baffled attacks upon the etymo- 
logy of the name of that Hebrew Ammon, Noah ? It is, at all events, of 
great moment that the Jupiter AMN and the Egyptian Adam MNA 
should not only be written with the same sounds but w T ith the same letters, 
and that the only difference should consist in placing the feather with its 
feather edge looking right or looking left. 

Appendix A to page 322. 

Auspices. Why are the intestines of birds called giblets ? Because they 
have anything to do with a fork, in German gabel ? That would be absurd 
enough. Or because the heart, cceur, cor, is the principal entrail ? That 
is nearer the truth ; but reverses the true explanation. The cceur is in- 
deed the mystical cabar, or shrine of life ; but the liver also mystically 
received the same name, jecur, ia-eor. All the entrails were cabala, and 



APPENDIX. 377 

objects of divination. The priest prophesied over the shape and number 
and posture of the folds of the bowels of the victim on the altar. They 
were his cabalistic machinery, his giblets. 

Appendix to page 323. 

Hoopoo. This legend has a high interest in view of the fact that the 
tarn sceptre of the Pharaohs has for a handle the head of a hoopoo ; per- 
haps adopted on account of its erectile top-knot feathers. 

Appendix to page 325. 

Birds. The pigeons of the valley of the Nile astonish by their numbers. 
In the Thebaid the situation of the villages is designated to the traveller 
on the river by a compact castellated mass of square towers, built of mud 
and reeds, crowned with battlements of goulahs, or large earthen pots, 
and pierced in stories with ranges of holes for the entrance and exit of the 
birds. These towers are curious caricatures of the propylea of the tem- 
ples. The people however make very little use of the flesh of these birds 
for food, and permit the traveller to shoot among the flocks at his pleasure, 
wherever his boat may be detained by a head- wind against the bank, or in 
his journeys inland. But each pigeon-tower becomes valuable to its owner 
as a storehouse of guano, which is used about the roots of the sugar canes. 
Nothing in Egypt is more amazing than the infinity of birds of all kinds. 

Some of the Egyptian myths about birds are very surprising. The 
Phoenix story is familiar to everybody. But it seems that the vulture — 
which plays so large a part on the monuments, and may be seen in flocks, 
in a striking attitude on the sandbanks of the river, with its wings spread, 
breast to the wind and back to the sun, while magpies hover and skip 
among the group, picking at the parasites of the vultures — is accounted 
in mythology the emblem of maternity. Every vulture was considered a 
female, and her virginity therefore implied. The vulture-headed goddess 
of the South, Souvan (the Greek Lucina), is represented on the monuments 
as ' the mother ' par excellence. She sometimes hovers as a victory over 
the field of battle. The 'grand mother, who bears the Sun, Neith/ the 
Athene or Minerva of the Greeks, is also always a virgin mother. Her 
son is said on the monuments to be 'conceived, not engendered/ This 
goddess is the vavg, or ship, and her vulture is the BAR-TOR. 

Appendix to page 327. 

Stork. In the King's Tomb, No. 17 (Belzoni's), in chamber No. 3, on 
the right hand of the gallery, after passing in at the first doorway, I saw 
a fine painting of the African stork with two long backward- bending head- 
feathers, sitting upon the sharp apex of a tripod, the three feet of which 
rested on a sort of flanged board, the flanges preventing the two outer 
leg-bars from spreading. 

The priests used the walking posture of the legs in a great variety of 
applications. In this same tomb one may see snakes with two and others 
with four legs in this position. In one of the sepulchral chambers at Beni 



378 



APPENDIX. 



Hassan I noticed an extraordinary object like the horn of an anvil walking 
(as a letter) upon two human legs, the hinder part seemed erased, and 
looked like one side of a dish with a loop hanging down ; but there was 
nothing symmetrical about the figure except the legs, and it had a weird 
expression of life and motion in its front part, which was quite sharp. 

Appendix to page 340. 



Serpent worship. In the Ramesseum at Abydos there is a beautiful 
figure of a serpent coiled round a tapering conical vessel set upon a low 
tripod, underneath a table of one (central) leg supporting a row of feathers, 
as an offering. 

In the tomb of Seti at Thebes (Belzoni's) an immensely long serpent is 
carried along the wall, by many priests, between every two ot whom the 
snake is kinked into a fold, producing the classical fret moulding, in one 
instance square and in another round. 

In the ' tomb of Memnon ' is a procession of twelve snakes, each on two 
legs ending below in a fork stuck into a short board or stand. Each snake 
is convoluted in such a way that the same fret moulding is produced by 
the whole series. 

At Dendera I saw the v snake of the alphabet used as the cross-piece 
of the sign of- life. 

The cobra of India is the cabalistic serpent above all others. 



Appendix to Lecture XL 

MABIETTE'S RESUME OP MONUMENTAL AUTHORITIES, 1867. 



r 



i. 

ii. 

in. 



b 

. a 

"o 

E 

<! 



IV. 



"1 



Pyramid of steps, Saccara (4th king, 1st dynasty). 
Tomb of Tot-hotep, Saccara. Three statues of 
family of functionary Sepa (Louvre). Tomb and 
statue of Amten (Berlin) contemporary, of penulti- 
mate king of 3rd dynasty. Diggings at Abydos 
now going on. Tablet of Saccara gives 2 kings of 
1st, 6 of 2nd, 8 of 3rd dynasty. 

Pyramids of Giseh, 4th dynasty. Pyramid at Abou- 
sir, 5th dynasty. Magnificent tombs at the Pyra- 
mids and at Saccara. Temple of alabaster and 
granite discovered by Mariette at the foot of the 
great Sphinx, the only architectural monument yet 
discovered of the ancient empire. Statue of Chep- 
hren, founder of 2nd Pyramid (Exposition at Paris). 
Inscription of Khoufou, founder of 1st Pyramid, 
4th dynasty, the great key to the Egyptian civiliz- 
ation. Large style, found at the Pyramid Giseh to 
the mistress of Snefrou II. and Khoufou, and maid 
of honour to Schafra. Wooden statue, private por- 
trait (Exposition at Paris). Eine sarcophagi of 
granite, 4th dynasty. Fifty monolith steles, sta- 
tues, &c, in Boulaq Museum. 



APPENDIX. 



379 




s 



YI. Monuments at Elephantine, El-Kab, Kasr-es-Sayed, 

Abydos, Cheyk-sa'id, Zaouyet-el-Maitin, Memphis, 
San Wadi-Maghara. Great inscription on tomb 
of Ouna, Abydos, under Kings Teti, Pepi, Meri-en- 
ka, refutes the assertion that Apappus reigned 
100 years (Boulaq). Inscription to a functionary 
of Abydos, who served under the same three kings. 
and also Nefer-ke-Ra. 
No monuments. 

Steles, vases, fruits, bread, clothes, furniture, arms, 
utensils, of rude style, in Boulaq Museum. The 
winged Isis, protecting Osiris, appears. Hiero- 
glyphics are awkward. All got at Lrah-abouT- 
neggah, Thebes. 

Amenemha and Osortasen family. Trans, at Ouady 
Majarah, Kumnah, Semnah. Obelisks of Mata- 
rieh, Payoum (Begyg). Grand hypogees of Beni- 
hassan. Grottoes of Syout. Colossi found at San 
and Abydos. Brilliant epoch of art. Formerly 
called the 18th dynasty, then 17th. 

Sebekhotep and Nofrehotep families. Hall of An- 
cestors. Papyrus of Turin. Steles in various 
museums. Colossi of San. Walls of tombs at 
Syout, Assouan, Hamamat. 

Hyksos invasion. No monuments. 

Hyksds dynasty established at San, side by side 
with a native dynasty at Thebes. Revival of art 
at Thebes. Reappearance of feathered cartouches 
in the tombs of Drah-abou'1-neggah (Thebes), 
vases, arms, &c, as before ; gilded winged figures. 
Old names -reappear. Theban kings on the tpmbs 
of Qournah, table at Marseilles, &c, &c. Hyksos 
kings, names of two found. First, Sa'ites ; last, 
Apophis (Apapi), Pour grand granite Sphinxes 
at San (Boulaq Museum) with a lion's mane, dedi- 
cated to the new Shemite god Set. Granite group 
of two figures (Boulaq Museum). Head of Hyksos 
king at Payoum (Boulaq Museum). Papyrus of the 
London Museum. Inscription on wall of tomb at 
El-kab, of functionary Ahmes, under King Raske- 
nen. Large granite stele at San, unreadable as yet. 
'XYIII. Amosis, Amenophis, Thoutmes, &c. Present confu- 

sion of records. Inscriptions at El-kab to Ahmes. 
Base of statue (Louvre). Stele to Neboua. In- 
scription to Hor-em-heb at Abd-el-Quourneh. Mon- 
uments at Gebel Barkal, temple and sphinxes of 
Amenophis I. Temples of Thoutmes III. at So- 
leb, Semneh, Amada in Nubia. Beautiful temple 
of Amenophis III. destroyed, on isle of Elephan- 



XII. 



XIII. 

XIY. 

XY. 

XYI. 

XYII. 






38.0 



APPENDIX. 



a 



O 



tine. Granite gate of Hatasou at Onibos. Bas- 
reliefs at Gebel Silsileh. Splendid constructions at 
Thebes. Temple of Deir-el Bahari. Colossi' of 
Amenophis III. Grand tombs of Abd-el-Quour- 
neh. Tombs of Kings in the valley of the west. 
Great works at Karnak. Temple of Luxor, Ame- 
nophis III., finished under the 26th dynasty. Other 
remains at El-kab, Tel-el-amarna, Gebel Touneh, 
Memphis, Saqqara, Pyramids, Heliopolis, Serbut- 
el-Kadim, Wady Magara. Beautiful statues now 
in Turin. Colossal bust of Thoutmes III., and 
a recent stele of granite, in Boulaq Museum, with 
the great poem of the Pentaour. Belies found on 
the mummy of Queen Aah-hotep, mother of King 
Amosis, now exhibiting at Paris, and described in 
Mariette's Apercu, pp. 92 — 95. 

XIX. Sesostris (Barneses II.) Seti, Menephthah, &c. Seven 

kings. Pormer monuments completed by these 
kings. Tombs of Bab-el-Molouk. The most splen- 
did tomb of Egypt is that of Seti I. The rock- 
temple of Ipsamboul (Barneses II.). Temples at 
Derr, Beit (Dually in Nubia (Barneses II.). Desert 
monument of Seti I., back of Edfou. Several 
little temples of Barneses II. at Karnak. The Ba- 
messeum. Seti's temple to Barneses I., at Quourneh. 
Tablet temple of Barneses II. at Abydos. Grand 
temple of Seti I. and Barneses II., now excavating. 
Probably lost temples at Memphis. Pine colossi 
at Myt-Bahyneh. Temple at San, rebuilt by Ba- 
rneses II., Menepthah and Seti II. Eleven obelisks, 
many monolith columns of granite, colossal steles 
lately found. 

XX. Barneses family. All its kings bear this name. 

Tombs of Bab-el-moulak. Civil wars. Pavilion 
and temple of Medinet Abou. Temple of Chons at 
Karnak, bearing false cartouches of 21st dynasty. 
Eine stele in Bib/ Boy. Paris from this temple, re- 
lating the story of the voyage of the god to Meso- 
potamia. 

XXI. High-priests at Thebes. Temple between Karnak 

and Luxor. The legitimate dynasty ruling at San. 

XXII. Nine kings of Tel Basta. Statue of the god Nile 

(British Museum). Inscriptions on the outside of 
the walls of 'Karnak. Inscriptions in tomb of Apis, 
at Saqqara (Louvre). No great edifice. 
XXITT. Three kings of San. Coushite inscription on stele 

found at Gebel Barkal. Many collateral dynasties ; 
civil wars. Steles of tomb of Apis. 

XXIV. Bocchoris. One king; name at last discovered in 

tomb of Apis. 

XXV. Cushite or Ethiopian dynasty. 



APPENDIX. 



381 



XXVI. Psammiticus. The Greeks appear in Egypt. Steles 

of tomb of Apis at Saqqara. Official epitaphs of 
the sacred bulls. Beautiful tombs of Assassif 
(Thebes). Hock inscriptions at Asouan, Hammat, 
Thebes, Abydos, Saqqara. The whole force of this 
dynasty concentrated itself at Sais. Here was the 
lost temple of Apries, described by Herodotus ; lost 
portico of Amosis superior to all others ; lost co- 
lossus of 70 feet high ; lost monolith in chapel of 
Amosis brought from the quarries of Elephantine. 

XXVII. Persians. Cambyses on the steles of Apis. Darius 

at Hamamat ; lost temple to Ammon at Khargeh. 
Artaxerxes on two fine vases in the Bib. Roy., 
Paris, and Treasury of St Marc at Venice. 
Civil wars. Grand temple at Philse commenced by 

XXVIII. Nectanebo II. Additions to Temples at Med-Abou, 
and Karnak by Nectanebo I. Tomb of Apis at 

[ Memphis completed by Nectanebo I. Fine propy- 

AA . r Ion in front of the tombs, Nectanebo I. Statues 

of Acoris and Nephrenites. Grand sarcophagi at 

XXX. Berlin, Paris, and Boulaq. No trace yet of the 
J rapid subsequent decline of Egyptian art. 

XXXI. Persians again. 

XXXII. Macedonians. Alexander I. on the granite gateway 

at Elephantine. Eine granite chamber at Karnak, 
in front of the sanctuary in the chamber of Thout- 
mes III., by Philip Arideus. Bas-reliefs of Alex- 
ander II. on walls of temples of Karnak and Luxor. 

XXXIII. Ptolemies. Great builders. Temples in Nubia, at 

Dakkeh, Kalabsheh, Debond, Dandour, especially 
Philse ; in Egypt at Ombos, Esneh, Erment, in 
detestable style, but of great magnificence. Orna- 
mented Alexandria. At Thebes, Deir-el-Medyneh ; 
little temple on the Birket-abou ; grand portal 
north of Karnak ; portal between Luxor and tem- 
ple of Chons ; little edifice by the side of temple 
of Chons. Denderah — great unread inscriptions, 
Edfou. Names also at El-kab, Motaneh (Esneh). 
Akhmin, Behbit, near Mahakeh-el-Kebir, &c, &c. 
The most beautiful part of the tomb of Apis at 
Saqqara, and its gigantic sarcophagi. Rosetta 
stone (British Museum). 

XXXIV. Romans. 5400 after Menes. Pompey's pillar at 

Alexandria. Adrian's Villa at Antinoe (Cheykh- 
abadeh). Adrian's tomb to Antinous, the obelisk 
Barberini at Rome was one of the obelisks and 
sphinxes before its gate. The emperors built at 
Kalabscheh, Dandour, Dakkeh, Philse, Edfou, Es- 
neh, Erment, Denderah. 



25 



APPENDIX 

Words for God, Spirit, Angel, Devil, in the various langu 



A. I. 

B. I. 

II. 
III. 



VII. 



vii : 



IV. 9. 

V. 10. 

VI. 11. 

VII. 12. 

VIII. 13, 

C. I. 14. 

II. 15. 

16. 

III. 17. 

IV. 18. 
19. 

V. 20. 
21. 
22. 
23. 
24. 
25. 
26. 
27. 
28. 
VI. 29. 



40. 
41. 
42. 
43. 
44. 
45. 
46. 
47. 
48. 
49. 
50. 
51. 
52. 



Vasconice 

Finnice 

Esthonice 

Lapponice 

Sueco-Lappo 

Syrjaene 

Permice 

Votjachice 

Ceremissice 

Morduanice 

Hungarice 

Vogulice 

Ostiachice 

Hibernice 

Cambrice 

Armorice 

Epirotice 

Graece 

Neo-Graece 

Latine 

Italice 

Hispanice 

Lusitanice 

Gallice 

Provineialiter 

Catalaunice 

Rhaetice 

Valaebiee 

Gothice 



30. Teutoniee 



Germaniee 

Saxoniee 

Neo-Sax. 

Hollandice 

Anglo-Sax. 

Anglice 

Frisice 

Neo-Frisice > 

Islandice "I 

Suecice )■ b 

Danice J 

Slavonice 

Russice 

Illy rice 

Slovenice 

Bulgarice 

Polonice 

Bohemice 

Sorabice 

Borussice 

Lithuanice 

Lettice 



*Jainco, Jinco, *Jaungoico 

Ju mala 

Jummal 

Ibmel 

Jubmel, Ibmel 

Jen 

(Jen) 

(In mar) 

Joma 

Paz 

Isten 

(Tarom) 

(Tor6m) 

Dia 

Duw, 

Doue 

TlepvTt 

Gfos 

Oeos 

Deus 

Dio, Iddio 

Dios 

Deos 

Dieu 

Diou, Dieou 

Deu 

Deus 

Dumnezeu 

Gub 

Got, Kot 

Gott 

God, Got 

God 

God 

God 

God 

God 

Goad 

Gud 

Gud 

Gud 

Bog 

Bog 

Bog 

Bog 

Bog 

Buh 

Boh 

Deiws 

Diewas 

Deews 



'Espiritu, *Megope 
Henki 
"YVaim 
Vuaigqa 
"Wuoigenes 
Duh 
(*Zyn) 

*(Zyn') *(Lul') 
'Siiles 
'Oime 

Szellem, Lelek 
*(Atta) 

*(E P yt/), *(Ebyl') 
Spiorad 
Yspryd 
Spered 
2?rip"r 
Hvev/na 
Tlveu/ma 
Spiritus 
Spirito 
Espiritu 
Espirito 
Esprit 

Esprit, Esperit 
Esperit 
Spirt 
Duh 
Ahma 
f A Atum, A Adum, Ahatui 
( Ahadum, Geist, Keii ! 
Geist 
Gest 
Geest 
Geest 
Gast 

Spirit, Ghost 
lest, Gast, Gest 
Gaest 
Audi 
Ande 
Aand 
Duh 
Duh 
Duh 
Duh 
Duh 
Duch 
Duch 
Duch 

Noseilis, Nuseilis 
Dwafe 
Gars 



.ECTUKE X. 

)f Europe, as reported by Prince Lucien Buonaparte. 



mgueru 

Keli 

jel 

igel 

igel 

lgel 



*Deabru, Demonio 

Perkelet, Piru 

Kurrat, Judas, Tigge, Kohn, Kohnrat, Pahharat 

Baergalakka 

Parkel, Paha innemi 

Diavol, Bes 





Kel'temas, Diavol, 'Saltan, 'Soi'tan 


l 


Diavol, 'Saltan 


/al 


Ordog 


ngiol, Aingeal 


Diabhal, Deamhan 


ngel 


Diafol, Diawl, Diafl, Cythraul 


sd, El 


Diaoul, Aeraouant 


yyik' 


TlaovSs, AyiaX', ~2arava, Acll/ulove 


yygXos 


Atd/3o\"os 


yyeXos 


Aia/3o\os, Aaifxwv, Aai/uioviov 


Qgelus 


Diabolus 


agelo, Angiolo 


Diavolo, Demonio 


ngel 


Diablo, Demonio 


ajo 


Diabo, Demonio 


age 


Diable, Demon 


agi, Ange 


,, Demoni, Demonn 


ngel 


,, . fi 


angel 


Giavel, Dimuni 


a'ger, Angel 


Diavol, Drak 


jgilus, Aggelus 


Diabaulus, Unhutya, -o, Skobsl 


lgil, Engil 


Diubil, Diufal, Tiefel, Tievei 


igel 


Tenfel 


igil, Engel 


Diufeal, &c, XJnhold 


igel 


Diivel 


igel 


Duivel 


igel, iEngel, Angel 


Deofol, Seneca, Sceocca, Scocca 


igel 


Devil 


Uigel, Angl. 


Diovl, Divel 


gel 


Dyvel, Deal 


igil], Eingill 


Djdfull 


igel 


Djefvul 


igel 


Djaavel 


ggel 


Diavol, Bes, 'Cert 


agel 


Djavol, Be's, Cert 


igjeo 


Djavao, Vrag, Hudoba 


igel, Angele 


Vrag, Hudie, Hudir, Zlodi, Zlodey, 'Cert 


agel 


Diavol, Bes 


dot 


Diabet, Czart, Bies, Bis 


id'el, Angel 


'Dabel, 'Cert, 'Das 


tid'zel 


Djabot, 'Cert 


igels 


Pickuls 


igilas 


Welnas, Szetonas, "VVelinas, Czartas, Befas 


.gelis 


Wels, Welns 



ERRATA. 



Page 


line 




29 


27 


read obscene for obscure 


62 


20 


„ Jurassic „ Durassic 


95 


9 


„ Melanesians „ Milanesians 


142 


last 


jj leti jj set 


155 


26 


„ Nubia „ Numidia 






'<*•♦• 



MAR 1959 J) 



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